In These Walls
by Brigidforest
Summary: Rikku centric fic, one year after X2. Rikku decides to confront her fears and camp out in the Den of Woe, but too many unexpected encounters and memories will complicate her simple plan. GxR, BxR.
1. Prologue

Hey there! I am a new writer to the game fan fiction "genre," so bear with me as I get my bearings. This is a Rikku-centric fic, so I guess you could call it Rikku's story. This fic's pairings are mainly RikkuxGippal and RikkuxBaralai, with the usual TxY, WxL, etc. I don't think my fic will be mostly RxG or mostly RxB. I think it will be pretty even, as I do love both couples pretty equally.

When you read the prologue, you might be a little startled, but this is the prologue and not the first chapter, so it's not the actual start of the story yet. I will post pretty regularly, because the chapters will be a bit shorter than I'm used to. And thank you thank you for even checking this story out.

-B

**----**

**In These Walls**

_Prologue_

I suppose I should start this story at the beginning, not the very beginning of the world called Spira and how it came to be, but the beginning of a new era, the Eternal Calm. The calendars have all shifted and the current year is 4 E.C., and the years I will talk about are the last decade of S.R., Sin's Reign. It all began really with a man born in Bevelle, the great Yevonite city of Spira. His name was Braska, and when this man realized that he had a gift to summon the great spirits of his ancestors that held the world together, known as the Fayth, he knew that he had been born for the very purpose of stopping Sin…

Sin—I should stop and talk about what Sin is. It started in 978 S.R., when tradtion-rich Bevelle waged war against the powerful island of Zanarkand. Bevelle, the Red City as it was known then, was swiftly losing under the superior technological advantage of its enemy. According to legend, its top leader, Lord Yu Yevon, found a scroll that described how to construct an incredible armor that would end the war. Sin was this armor. Sin was the beast that would be reborn every ten years since its creation in 980 S.R. I have always felt that the year should have been 1 S.R., but they say that Sin always reigned before then, even before it actually came into being by Yu Yevon's hands. With what we know now, I couldn't possibly deny that. But Sin, this ungodly armor, wiped out all of Zanarkand. Some say Yu Yevon lost control, and some say he did it intentionally. It was too long ago for us to know for sure. For over a thousand years, Sin used the souls that it killed for power in order to be reborn. Its very thick leathery skin was the souls of thousands of people, thousands of Fayth-like beings, of the families that birthed the families alive today. That was Sin. That was Yu Yevon's creation.

…Then there was Braska, and it was not that he was particularly gifted, but he was driven and he had one of the Fayth's weapons at his service. Should I explain summoners? It is so embedded in Spira's common history that I forget this is an account for those who may not be familiar at all with the current world. Summoners were like priests, connected to all the spirits around them. Most spirits are simply pyreflies, glowing smoky energy that fills this planet, but the special ones, the ones that fought against Sin, those were the Fayth. The Fayth had the power to make people. That doesn't sound quite right. I must re-write it, but later. Now—

These summoners would go through trials to unite with the Fayth and summon them in their beast forms to fight against Sin. With guardians by their side to protect and help them stay alive through their pilgrimage, the summoners would have traverse the entire continent from south to the very north to reach Zanarkand for their final summon and face Sin. It isn't as glorious as it sounds, because these young hopefuls—and they were always terribly young—would either die during the pilgrimage or if they succeeded, they died killing Sin. That's all they were, mere human sacrifices to the giant grey beast that haunted the waters and skies of Spira.

Lord Braska was different only because he was an anomaly. He was not more gifted than the next, but he had been blessed by the Fayth and supplied with a guardian they created with their incredible power. They summoned Jecht, an ordinary Blitzball sports player from old Zanarkand, the shadow of a spirit, and made him flesh and bone. They fused pyreflies with their magic and birthed a real human being out of the city that only existed in the dreams of the Fayth…

I have my theory as to why they chose Braska over all the others. Braska was devoid of the usual racist compulsion found in many Spirans and had married to an Al Bhed, making his reputation as a summoner laughable in the eyes of all Yevonites, and that meant mostly all of Spira. The Al Bhed race never followed the teachings of Yevon, particularly those that prohibited the use of machines or technology not sanctioned by the religious institution. Perhaps the Al Bhed instinctually knew that there was no spiritual merit to Yevon, and that it was simply used to appease and control the masses. But because of their resistance against the religion, they suffered more than any peoples in Spira. They bore the brunt of the blame for every misfortune and endured everything from being exiled to ethnic cleansings.

…But Braska, being one of pure Bevellian Yevonite blood, fell in love with an Al Bhed woman. And she birthed his daughter, Yuna, the summoner, who, at the mere age of seventeen, would bring the Eternal Calm to Spira and kill Sin once and for all.

Yuna had the most guardians ever recorded for a summoner. There was Auron, her father's own High Guardian; Lulu, an ex-guardian herself for a summoner that died at the hands of one of the Fayth; Wakka, a blitzball player and strong faithful Yevonite back then; Kimahri, exiled from his own race, the Ronso; and most remarkably, the first Al Bhed guardian ever: Rikku, Yuna's cousin and the daughter to the great Al Bhed leader, Cid, for which she was considered the princess of the Al Bhed. Yuna also had her own shadow spirit, Tidus, son of Jecht, and also a dream like his father, made into flesh by the Fayth.

All of them went against Yevon's teachings. They brought down the power of the leaders of Yevon, the maesters, and entered Sin, defeated the spirit of Yu Yevon from within and instead of a human sacrifice, the Fayth used their own lasting power to undo the armor forever.

Peace was never promised with the Eternal Calm, as many Spirans came to realize. What was promised was that there would be no more Sin. But with the organization of New Yevon (formed out of the rubble of the old Yevon) having to answer for the all the many centuries of corruption, and new groups forming as a deterrent of religion such as the Youth League, constant political wars began to form and the senate of Spira still had as little power as it did during Yevon's long unquestioned reign. And since Yevon no longer existed to prohibit the use of machines, the Al Bhed also began their rise to power through the Machine Faction. These three organizations were forced to unite but a year ago to fight against a mechanical demon from Spira's haunting past. Yuna once again joined the fight, along with Rikku and their partner, Paine, mostly by chance. They all found out that the most valuable and dangerous thing about Spira was its mysterious and muddled history.

Oh, I've realized that I haven't introduced myself yet, and I suppose now would be the ideal time. My name is Bevelle. I lived over two thousand years ago, when Sin meant a completely different thing.

These are my words—the words that I have written using the last of my strength, the last of my energy. I am the daughter of a prophet. I am the daughter of the woman that nurtured this planet into being. My parents, like Yuna's, were of mixed race. My father was of the beautiful dark-skinned people of Bikanel, and my mother was of the powerful fair-skinned people known as the Spiran race.

I am the daughter of Suen, which my mother's people always pronounced as_ Sin._


	2. Portrait of Salvation

**In These Walls**

_Portrait of Salvation_

The past was a rocky superfluous concept for the Al Bhed, whereas Yevon seemed to thrive from it. While the Al Bhed constantly lived in the idea of tomorrow and progress, Yevon built its kingdom on repression and regression. The war of machina a thousand years ago had been the catalyst that would plunge the Al Bhed race into a huge and cyclical dispersal, and push Spira under the power of Yu Yevon's teachings. A man that Rikku, along with the rest of guardians, eventually came to know as Sin. Or something like that, for even years later, it would never be quite clear in her mind how the whole armor of pyreflies, with Yu Yevon as its mastermind, really worked. But that was Yevon for you. Everything that sprouted from the religion had come from some illogical unsatisfiable reasoning. With Yevon, the less it made sense, the better. The more they could convince the masses that they were right with their superstitions and teachings (which by the way, no one exactly knew where they were written, if they were written anywhere), the better it was for all the maesters and priests of Spira. She didn't profess to exactly know what Yevon was all about, but it did bother her that no other beliefs could stand up to it.

Having lived so long in the desert, isolated from the world, would leave a person kind of clueless about some things. At the moment (this particular moment meaning during the pilgrimage to kill Sin), Rikku juggled the different concepts in her head: this cursed religion versus her loyalty to the Al Bhed. She had always considered Yevon to be some kind of nonsensical jarble, but then, as she found herself waiting for Yuna and company to finish their visit to the dead in the Farplane Glen—a kind of ethereal cemetery—she couldn't help but try to make sense of all the conflicting ideas running through her head. Her cousin was a summoner, which meant she was like the priests and maesters—she was a Yevonite. But Rikku, after dozens of thought battles in her mind, concluded that first and foremost, she was family, and nothing in the world could possess Rikku to abandon family.

There were some methodological theories in Al Bhed literature on what exactly pyreflies were and how their reactions with human memory and the psychological brain waves of sorrow had some kind of reaction in them that produced illusions. Not that no one had tried to scan them and analyze them before, but the Al Bhed were usually never allowed in the Farplane or didn't want to go near it. The phrase she had spouted before Tidus had gone in—"Memories are nice, but that's all they are"—was a common Al Bhed saying. It had to do with survival. It had to do with the dozens of Dispersals her people had endured.

Rikku dug into her pocket, feeling too idle and growing impatient of the wait. She pulled out several small sugar candies and turned around to glance at Auron, who still stared out into space and away from the entrance. He was as reluctant about the whole affair as Rikku was, if not more so than her.

"You like sweets?" Rikku turned around and extended her hand with three multicolored ball-shaped treats. Auron shook his head, suddenly grimacing, as if he knew ahead of time (and ahead of Rikku herself) that she would soon attempt to strike up a conversation with him. It only took two more minutes before she addressed him again.

"So what's the real reason you don't go in there?" Rikku asked, and his face remained stoic. She realized he had no intention of responding, but she continued to pry. "I mean, 'I don't belong there' may have worked for Tidus, but that really doesn't make any sense."

He grunted, and Rikku smiled to herself. She was getting somewhere, she could tell from the scowl he was trying to conceal. It was so like men to hide all their emotions. She should know. She had grown up babysitting the men around her.

"You're not scared, that's obvious, but you do seem to dread it." Another grunt, and she wanted to laugh right there. She knew she had him.

"What about you?" he simply said. She pulled back with her brow wrinkled to an expression of confusion.

"What do you mean?" She began playing with the belts of her leg. It was a nervous compulsion—fidgeting with anything on her that dangled.

"You don't really believe that it's just pyreflies reacting to your memories, do you?" Auron had his eyes closed now and his face deep into the neck of his red coat. The long scar across his right eye was suddenly spark of threatening lightning. Rikku shifted in her position uncomfortably.

"Of course I do," she said with a smile.

"You're as bad a liar as Yuna." He opened his good eye and regarded Rikku for a moment, and then he closed it again.

"It's not that. I mean, the Al Bhed, we," she stopped. She didn't know what she wanted to say.

"The Al Bhed don't get sent," he interjected.

"Yeah, you understand. I mean, this is a Yevon thing, not really my cup of--," she said, but he interrupted her again.

"Being a guardian is 'Yevon thing.'" Goddamn it, she thought, when had the conversation turned around on her?

"That's different. I just don't like the farplane. The farplane is place of sorrow and remembering all those that were close to you that are dead. Well, that's too many people for me." Rikku stopped and placed her hands over her mouth. She had blabbed way too much.

"Everyone has a lot of people they lost," he countered, but this struck the embarrasment from her and instead summoned up anger.

"No," she whispered. "Not like the Al Bhed. Do you know what the average Al Bhed lifespan is?" She had stood up and neared him. "Twenty-five years. Do you know what the rest of Spira's lifespan is with Sin and everything? Thirty-five. How old are you? Forty? Our lifespan doesn't even begin to compare with anyone's." She would have continued, but Auron had his eye open and focused on her. He finished the thought she had in mind.

"Except a summoner. Most summoners die before they even reach their mid-20's." Rikku sighed.

"I hate the Farplane. I hate pyreflies. I hate them because they inexplicably keep your saddest emotions and make them into pictures. The pictures don't even talk to you, they just stand there, and they don't do anything. They're just portraits." Rikku shook her head. The doubts, the anger and the fear were all spilling out of her. She needed to stop talking.

"You've been in the Farplane before," Auron simply said, and Rikku smiled nervously, another one of her many antsy quirks.

"I know. It's obvious it scares me. I just hate it." After a brief pause, he stood up and grabbed his sword as if he could sense them coming.

"At least, you admit it. That's a wise thing," he uttered his last word as the first person emerged back from the Farplane portal.

All she could think of was that she was more than ready to leave, because it reeked of death. It reeked of something wicked and unnatural.


	3. Displacement

Al Bhed words used will often be self-explanatory (like in this chapter, they're both curse words), or written for the purpose so you don't understand it right away, say from someone else's perspective who doesn't know Al Bhed. But either way, except for the curse words, I will keep a glossary of the ones I use in my info page. And I'm sorry, I'm getting to the plot starting with this chapter.

-B

---

**In These Walls**

_Displacement_

Al Bhed.

Being an Al Bhed meant pain. It meant discrimination and abandonment. It meant homelessness and fear. It meant she had to be stronger than anyone else. She always considered herself one of those people that could survive anything, and she truly strived to be the strongest and at some point she thought she was. Then she met Yuna. Her cousin wasn't just strong, she was also selfless and absolutely devoted, something Rikku would never understand. Rikku, Al Bhed royalty and High Guardian.

Then Rikku slowly got to know her cousin. Yuna hadn't been strong like that always. She hadn't always wanted to defeat Sin, and she doubted herself all the time. It was when Yuna met Tidus that everything changed, and she felt more ready than ever to defeat Sin. Her strength stemmed from Rikku herself—Yuna had told her—and all the other guardians that would willingly give their life for her, but above all, it stemmed from the incredible emotion Tidus had awakened in her. That was how Yuna managed to become strong enough to give up her summons and kill off Sin. That was how she managed to search for Tidus to end of Spira. Rikku also thought that it was this strong emotion between them that had compelled the Fayth to let Tidus live again, not as a dream, but as a human being.

Rikku longed for something like that. Her life had been filled with sorrow and uncertainty—everyone in Spira had felt like that at some point. But it had been so lonely and Rikku had to be stronger with each passing day, if it wasn't Home being destroyed, or Al Bheds being attacked, it was Sin and then Vegnagun. At some point, she started running out of that strength, wondering where her reserves had gone. She would have to find more somewhere inside her. She wasn't like Yuna. She couldn't rely on anyone like Tidus for that kind of thing. Rikku had to find it in solitude, in the thought that no one would be there to save her or love her.

It was the Al Bhed way.

---

She pulled off her bandana and let her hair fall at her shoulders. The braids had caused several strands of blonde hair to curl in messy zigzags, but she simply ruffled it a bit, easing some of the tension from her headache, and then jumped in the shower. The steam warmed her face and the water drummed therapeutically on her body. She closed her eyes, turning around and facing the showerhead, asking the water to undo whatever feeling was overcoming her and forcing the sting away from under her eyelids. She hit the metal wall with a solid punch.

"Cred," she whispered. "Cred!" She ran her hands through her face. This had been the worst day she'd had in long while. But at least she had been successful in one thing, not one tear managed to break through, and she was happy with herself for that small feat. After the shower, she still stared at herself reproachfully in the mirror while re-tying her braids and putting up her hair with her usual blue headband.

"Nothing gets me down," she said sternly to her reflection with her chin high air. "Nothing." Cue the trademark Rikku cheery smile.

At least the day was almost over. All she had to do was survive dinner and show her team she was fine, that the whole scene from earlier had been a fluke and that she had recovered perfectly.

"Rikku," Nhadala approached her before Rikku could even enter the dining area. For Yevon's sake, her stomach growled furiously. Rikku didn't have time for a quick chitchat with the boss (she made a mental note to kick Gippal for making Nhadala the boss of this expedition, didn't she have a desert to run?).

"What is it? I'm starving." Rikku made a circular motion with her hand around her stomach, but Nhadala's gaze remained stern and somewhat impatient.

"I need to talk to you," she said pointedly. Rikku smiled and nodded. "It's about today," Nhadala said and started for her office motioning Rikku to follow her. She suddenly became fully aware of what Nhadala wanted with her and the strict woman's facial expressions alarmed Rikku. She was sure of it now. Someone on Rikku's diving team had told Nhadala. She supposed it was Netta, after all, she had always shown a pang of jealousy at any mention of Rikku and Sin in the same sentence, and Vegnagun was even worse, but nothing compared to Rikku's high status with the Al Bhed. Sometimes Rikku thought of it as a curse more than a compliment.

But Rikku understood Netta's resentment as natural and at first, it was Netta with whom she tried her hardest to befriend and understand. Netta, to conceal her envy, treated Rikku good-naturedly enough and shared her own brave anecdotes of survival through the Great Dispersal and the attack on Home. Rikku always knew never to mistake the woman's honesty for affection, but rather as competition. It wasn't a bad prospect. There was nothing like a bit of rivalry to brighten the dullness that could easily haunt routine dives.

Once they entered into Nhadala's office, Rikku immediately decided to assert herself and set the pace of the conversation.

"Is the machine we found not salvageable?" Rikku asked as Nhadala slipped behind her desk full of old mechanic trinkets and papers.

"Oh no," said Nhadala, "It's one of our rarest finds. The engine of the ancient meta-racer—that's what the mechanics are calling it for its power it seems—is not in any workable condition, but we can still use it as a prototype to hopefully manufacture better hovers. It's excellent news. We'll do a few more dives around the area and head back to Djose to put everything together." Nhadala stopped, her excitement quickly replaced with some other somber expression. At this point, Rikku was about to inquire more details and request permission to take a look at it tonight, but Nhadala hardly paused and instead, gracefully diverted the topic.

"It was an excellent find, Rikku, the team you lead has brought us some good stuff," Nhadala said. Rikku knew whatever Nhadala wanted to say had to be bad, because she never complimented anyone. "But there's a problem. You froze up in the cave. We don't do many cave expeditions, but since we need to look further into it…"

"I was fine though," interjected Rikku with a nervous smile. "Just an _insy_-little blunder."

"Yes, you were _fine _after two healing potions and a near-fatal blow." Nhadala's usual ruthlessness returned to her demeanor. Rikku thought of accusing her team of exaggerating, but didn't say anything in the end. If her team said so, then she had to show she trusted their judgment. "I'm taking you off the team," Nhadala added.

"I don't believe this!" Rikku sprang to the desk, placing both of her hands on its metal surface and leaning in on Nhadala. "They're exaggerating. You can't do this," countered Rikku in her anger.

"It's no exaggeration if a Gullwing and High Guardian freezes up at the sight of one fiend," Nhadala said coolly. She was acting as if Rikku had burnt out, or worse, had gone insane.

"I am the best goddamn diver," Rikku put in. Why was she fighting for this job so badly? Maybe because she wanted it, because it gave her purpose, and it was something she was exceptionally good at. The original Gullwings had mostly split up and now been replaced by an all-male team. Buddy and Brother still led, not only hunting spheres, but doing odd jobs for money. Yuna had Tidus, and that was enough said, and Paine, Yevon knows what she was doing. The last Rikku had heard was that Paine had been doing digs in some old ruins past the mountains beyond the basin east of the Moonflow. Paine said she wanted to find a ship of her own.

"I know that, Rikku," Nhadala said with a shake of head and then leaned in on her desk with pensive expression on her face. "I'll give you a month off. All we have left here to do is finish up in that cave and then we're going to Djose and then Bikanel probably for a while. You can meet up with us there."

Rikku growled and threw her arms in the air. "Fine," she said. "I'll ask Brother to pick me up and I'll be out of your sight." She huffed and stumped to exit.

As she closed the door, she heard Nhadala mutter "brat" followed by a grunt. Rikku threw up her fist against the door. "Vilg oui." She smirked and walked away to her room to pack her things.

"Rikku." A redhead woman stood waiting by the door of her room.

"Raynd, hey!" Rikku managed a weak smile as she spotted a frown spread across the woman's face.

"I'm sorry," Raynd said, taking Rikku's hand in her own. Rikku shook her head. She now figured that her whole team, not just Netta, had told Nhadala about their concern. Had it really been that bad? She trusted Raynd though, and if she thought it had been a problem, then she had no choice but to respect that. However, Raynd had developed this closeness and affection to Rikku, which could in a way make her a tad bit over protective.

"Don't be sorry. I was bound to leave eventually."

"Holy shit, she fired you? Okay, when we told her, it wasn't so she could fire you. I mean, she's strict, but I never thought she was a complete bitch and I—" Raynd would have kept rambling if Rikku hadn't put her hands over her friend's mouth, hoping no one actually heard her.

"It's not like that. She gave me some time off, but I decided that I'm done with diving for now." Raynd cleared her throat and removed Rikku's hands away from her face, but said nothing. After a while, Rikku finally added, "It's going to be like starting over. I love new beginnings!" Rikku cocked her head to the side now with a full-on grin.

"Oh stop it, I hate it when you get over-perky," Raynd muttered and frowned deeper. Rikku smiled despite of her comment. Raynd had always been one of those cynics, and as friends they had been good together, always leveling each other out. "But what exactly did Nhadala say?" Raynd finally asked.

"It doesn't matter. The point is I'm not coming back," Rikku answered, pressed her lips tightly together trying to avoid the frown and the tears that would follow it. Raynd finally smiled for her.

"Take care, will you? Meet up with us in Djose. You'll like this puppy, the one we found." Rikku wrapped her arms around Raynd and thanked her.

"Oh don't do that. I'll cry and then my reputation will go to hell. Anyway, I hate it when you get all huggy, but, I suppose just this once," Raynd murmured, relenting and hugging her back. "See you around." Then Raynd left her and went tell the other team members of the news. They all came ceremoniously to her room and said their goodbyes, and to her surprise, Netta even cried.

Another form of displacement, so where would she go now? She had a month to sort herself out, so that probably meant a mandatory visit to Besaid. She would spend some time with (now one-year old!) Vidina and hang out with the two lovey-dovey couples. At least Wakka and Lulu were nowhere near as sickening as Tidus and Yuna had become.

In Besaid, she would devise a plan to help her make sure what she felt back in that cave would never happen again.


	4. Where the Pyreflies Sleep

Hoho, so I'm a little sad I haven't gotten a review yet, but I'm sure a lot of people are like, wtf is she even doing? It's okay. So here's a little TidusxYuna, TidusxRikku (friendship!) moment for you. I have a little hope that someone out there is reading this, yes, no? maybe so?

**In These Walls**

_Where the Pyreflies Sleep_

"Rikku, I've always supported you through everything," a sincere, but wary smile and then, "but honestly, that's insane. By yourself? The Thunderplains were one thing," Yuna shook her head and gave an urging look to both Tidus and Wakka to help her out.

"What's so bad about the Den of Woe again?" Tidus smiled nervously with his hand nervously scratching the back of his head. Yuna gave a half-grimace, half-smile and patted her lover on his shoulder.

"Never mind." She turned back to Rikku, who flinched and quickly regretted she had told anything to her cousin. But it had been such an enlightening _ah-ha!_ moment that hadn't sounded the least unreasonable to her. Rikku had become completely terrified of caves and pyreflies and what better place to confront all that than the cave that probably caused the fear itself. "It's still dangerous," Yuna added, "and according to Nooj and Baralai, there are some strange things going on around there."

Nooj and Baralai sure seemed dictate everything lately. Sure, they were the prominent leaders of the Youth League and New Yevon respectively, but that didn't mean Rikku had to listen to their every warning.

"Excellent." Rikku grinned proudly, and put one hand high in the air. "It'll be like a mission."

"No, it's not a mission. Why do you even want to camp out in the Den of Woe so badly?" Yuna sighed, stumbling over some of her words with obvious exasperation.

"I've been thinking a lot in the past two weeks." Rikku walked pensively with her index finger at her chin and a far-off gaze. She pointed to Yuna, her finger decisively pushing off the invisible resistance of her cousin. "This is the only way I can get some things resolved, Yunie." But there was no convincing her, and Yuna simply gave a wave of her hand.

"Fine, if there's no talking you out of this, then we're going with you," Yuna asserted with a nod.

"We are?" Tidus interjected again, but on seeing Yuna's 'you're-not-helping' stare, he straightened in his chair, and then relenting to Yuna's silent will, he shrugged.

"No, no, Yunie, please let me do this alone," Rikku pleaded. She needed to know she could do this alone. She had to do it alone. No more grandiose ex-summoner by her side to baby-sit her. It was her way of facing her fears. No one can do it with someone cooing at you on the side.

"But that Nooj guy said they're blowing it up for good, ya?" Wakka finally emerged out of his silent observation.

"What?" Both Yuna and Rikku voiced simultaneously.

"When will it happen?" Rikku asked, shaking the broad Wakka by the shoulders for the answer.

"I don't know." He gave a flinch and a nervous smile. Rikku groaned. Her plans were completely for nothing if that was the case.

"It's settled then. See, it's happening for a reason. You know that Paine would agree that it's utter madness on your part. I mean, Yevon, you took it the," Yuna suddenly stopped covering her mouth almost immediately. Her expression in her mismatched eyes was aghast, and she gazed at Tidus, also overcome with a sudden awkwardness. Wakka cleared his throat and said something about hearing Vidina crying. He ran out of the room, leaving Rikku simply gaping at her cousin, trying to decipher what she had meant to say.

"Why don't we talk about this tomorrow?" Tidus chuckled in his usual boyish nervous manner. Rikku still eyed them with curiosity, but was tired of arguing and of feeling guilty of going against Yuna's perfectly sound wishes—though Rikku hated to admit that last part.

---

Since his return, Tidus and Yuna had stayed up many nights lying about on the white cool sands of the beach under the moonlight. Yuna would trace the sparkling swath of stars across the darkness and tell her many anecdotes of being a Gullwing. He had realized then that she was a complete stranger to him, but his heart still clung to the familiarity of her smile and her selfless kindness toward Spira. But honestly, he couldn't imagine Yuna getting up and leaving without saying a word to anyone, or even deciding to run into a temple and steal a sphere. She had been very proud of that latter one. Her face glistened in the moonlight, and she pointed to her chest saying proudly, "And I said, we'll just take it!"

She sounded like a small child sometimes retelling those funny memories from high school, how she and her friends had done this or that, thought up silly notions, made insane choices. Her speech was fast and giddy. She was eager to show how much she had become and how much she had accomplished all by herself. She wanted him to see that she was not the pushover she had once been as a summoner and that in his absence, the will behind everything she had done, driven by his love, was as powerful as the same invisible force that pulled the moon closer to the planet during the summer tide.

And then, the anecdote on the Den of Woe finally presented itself, and Yuna's face lost her appetite to show and give. It became mournful and brought her voice down to a murmur. Tidus had laughed at the name, and commented on what an odd-sounding word "woe" was, but she had only smiled with her lips tightly pressed together as if trying to avoid a disapproving frown.

"I thought I had lived through some horrible things and that I knew everything, but that placed proved me wrong," she remarked and Tidus sat still, his brow tensing and his glare deepening. Yuna glanced toward the black night. She said she had only been stronger than Rikku and Paine, because she had familiarized herself with a kind of possession because of the Aeons, but the feeling of Shuyin, the thousand-year old spirit that possessed her, had almost devoured her. She felt him slip inside and dig and dig as if trying desperately to find something, seeking power she did not have or perhaps desperation she did not understand.

Seeing Rikku so determined to beat her fear of that cave like she had done for the Thunderplains made Tidus forget for a moment how terrible Yuna's description of that place had been. It had made Yuna, Rikku and Paine fight each other, and it had made the team members from the Crimson Squad that had trained in that place kill each other off. How could he forget that?

It was Rikku. She had that odd effect to make everything seem lighthearted and simple. Yuna's courage was a decisive collectedness, but Rikku was a cheery determination to face anything. Rikku had changed a lot too, more than he would probably ever get to know. Yuna knew these changes, and he did not, so when Yuna turned to him with an exasperated and horrified expression, all he could do was embrace her apologetically.

"I'm so stupid. I almost said," she stopped again and looked at him with disheartened eyes. "I almost said 'you took it the worst.'"

"Because it's true, isn't it, when you guys were in that cave, Rikku took it real bad." Tidus put in, but Yuna shook her head.

"I guess. I don't know. I'd never seen her like that before. Paine seemed lost and dejected. I fought her and it was over." Yuna laid her head on his shoulder. "Rikku—she—there was the most tormented look on her face. Whatever she was seeing, it was worse than whatever I saw or Paine saw for that matter."

"You've never talked to her about it?" Tidus stroked her soft brown hair.

"There was no time, and then it just never came up," she said and then pushed herself from him, "Why in the world would she ever do this?"

"Because she's Rikku. You know her best, Yuna, but from what I gather she's grown much stronger." At this Yuna nodded, but still seemed rather unconvinced about the whole situation. Tidus could tell how much Yuna wanted to protect her, but Rikku wasn't a child anymore. She had grown up and had been completely on her own for a year now.

"Why don't we sleep on it? I'll help you figure something out," he said and she smiled, cupping his face and kissing him. It was one of those rare moments for men, when for once, the right thing had actually come out of his mouth, and they said long-term relationships ruined that kind of thing. If he'd only known then, that though he had said the right thing at the right time, he would still have to deal with a very angered Yuna the next morning.

He had been asleep for only two hours, when he woke up in the middle of the night, startled out of his sleep, swearing he heard some kind of shuffling noise in the tent. Tidus wondered whether it was a small fiend or some other wild animal variety creature that had crept in, so he alerted his ears and opened his eyes letting them slowly adjust to the dark.

"Cunno." He heard a whisper and after a few seconds of mental delay due to his grogginess, he shot up in bed. He could recognize that apology any time. Yuna stirred a bit to his side, but remained asleep. He slowly slipped from underneath the covers, and put on a shirt as quickly as he could.

"Rikku!" Tidus yelled for her. He had chased her all the way to the other side of the island and as he got closer he heard the pulsing hum of engines. He finally saw her when he reached the beach and waiting for her there was the Celsius. Rikku had frozen in her steps, turned in a pivot and flinched at the sight of Tidus.

"I got caught," she said and chuckled nervously.

"Yeah, you did. What do you think you're doing?" He saw that she had her torn hunter green travel bag slung over her shoulder.

"Um, I'm going for a late night ride, dad?" She chuckled again.

"This will hurt Yuna's feelings. She's really worried about you," Tidus said, and Rikku grimaced.

"I know, but please, let me do this." She placed both palms together in a begging stance.

"Where are you going?" he asked, still not understanding her motives for running away.

"Bevelle." Her face became serious. The mere mention of the name called forth old resentments in both of them.

"You hate Bevelle," Tidus said reproachfully. Bevelle was the land of torment to him, not even the ruins of Zanarkand had that kind of reprehensible defensive effect in his character. In his mind, Bevelle was synonymous with Seymour and all the other the maesters, the cover-up of their crimes, and the deaths of so many innocent people at the hand of a religion that cared for nothing but its decrepit beliefs based on a deranged armor-maker.

"No, _you _hate it," she pointed out. Her usually striking green eyes had become grayish in the moonlight. He shook his head. What she said didn't matter, because deep inside he knew that Rikku had a similar resentment toward Bevelle.

"What for then?" he asked.

"Rikku! You're taking forever!" Brother muttered in his slurred Al Bhed from atop the deck. Rikku waved a hand at him and then turned back to Tidus.

"Tell Yunie I'm sorry, but I've got to get those spheres from Baralai anyway and make sure they don't blow up the Den of Woe before I even get a chance." She neared him, and he noticed her tight-lipped smile. She lightly nicked his chin with a fisted hand. "Cheer up, will you? I'll be fine." Rikku had that infectious demeanor about her that he just couldn't help but smile back.

"Maybe Yuna's right. There are better ways of dealing with something like this," he insisted, just a little bit more.

"Then it wouldn't be any fun." She grinned, tapping him playfully on the shoulder. "See you around, Tidus." She ran toward the Celsius, and the giant red airship let down its hangar door, and just before Rikku entered, she whipped her head around and yelled, "Don't have any babies while I'm gone!"

Tidus' face flushed and was thankful for the darkness of the night. He watched as the Celsius engines roared, and the ship ascended into the skies and finally out of view. Oh, he would have a quite scene tomorrow while he tried to explain this to Yuna. Why did Rikku always do this to him?


	5. The Golden Mermaid

Whoot! Someone _is_ reading my story. Much love to my first two reviewers. I was going to wait until tomorrow to post this, but it's pretty much done and ready, and I got very encouraged by the reviews. Whew, it's hard to get established around here.

Next chapter: Baralai, Rikku encounter (finally!) and soon after that, Rikku and Gippal. :) Slowly but surely.

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**In These Walls**

_The Goldern Mermaid_

As Rikku entered her brother's ship, she heard the bellowing of the engines, slow and wistful, groans riddled with emotions of disapproval. The Gullwings had been abusing the poor mechanisms again. The first thought that came to Rikku's mind after that was that Yuna would be mad, groaning in a similar reproachful manner, but worst than mad, she would be hurt. It would take a while before Rikku could make up this teenager running-away bit, but Yuna had done it too, so she didn't really have the right to lecture her too much about it.

"Rikku, you need to stop doing this. We are not a taxi service," Brother said with his hand extended out toward her the moment the door of the bridge slid open.

"I would beg to differ," she said handing him fifty gil as she walked inside. "How could you charge your own little sister?"

"We have costs, little sister. Engine room needs a check-up," he said and continued by stating the problem, but Rikku waved him off and headed for front the bridge. She would figure out what kind of abuse the engines had endured herself.

"Rikku, long time no see," Buddy said jokingly, sliding out of his navigators seat, and then proceeded to pat her on the back. The rest of the crew waved.

"Yeah, I know. I'm back so soon, but you better be nice. I'm going to be the one looking at your babies for the rest of the trip." Rikku winked, and Buddy laughed.

"So where to?" he asked, ready to plot the course on his screen.

"Bevelle," she said.

"Bevelle?" Brother shouted from behind her. "What the hell are _you _going to Bevelle for?"

"None of your business!" she said, and punched him in the stomach. He bent forward exaggeratedly and yelled after her as she headed to the engine room. It would take a second and more forceful jab for him to leave her alone to her work.

Why was everyone freaking out so much about Bevelle? So it was Yevon-land, but still, with Yuna they had been there dozens of times, usually on missions, but this in a way was a mission. It mattered a lot to Rikku to get those spheres and go to the Den of Woe. She needed to do this, because she couldn't afford what happened back on the S.S. Duyfken to reoccur. Knowing Nhadala, Rikku had probably become a good joke to tell to other Al Bhed.

"Can you imagine? A famous guardian and fighter of Vegnagun whimpering for her life?" They'd say and then burst out laughing.

She would put an end to that and get herself back—back from that place.

---

Rikku had a gift that not a lot of Al Bhed could claim. Her father would always tell the story that started it all, particularly to embarrass her in front of others, but he had some kind of fatherly pride about it, so Rikku always let it slide. It went something like, when she was only a youngin', three years old, they'd been sailing west down the Great Gulf to Bikanel island, and Rikku kept insisting that she wanted to see over the damn railing of the ship. She was too short, and couldn't do it herself. Her mother told her that she'd show her in a moment, but little Rikku couldn't wait, so she looked 'round and found a wooden box that'd slid against the edge of the boat; she climbed it and somehow fell right into the sea. Some o'the others yelled that a child'd been thrown overboard. Not seeing the little runt, Cid immediately dove in after her and found her, swimming fast to the surface away from some fiends, gliding past the small fish like 'a little golden mermaid.'

That was why Rikku had been diving expert at age fifteen, and why she became head of her own diving team a year ago at seventeen. She had an unmatched endurance for the water, "as good if not better than any blitzball player," her father would say. She joined an expedition that would explore around the archipelago west of Bikanel. It was on the first mission near the third island that they found those ruins and that cave. Everything was going smoothly, and they had first found a few rusted parts near the edges of what seemed to be a sunken town, probably the work of Sin. Two buildings had collapsed and a coral reef and aquatic forests of algae had formed on the walls creating crystallized soft surface. It was murky in there, but Rikku gave the go ahead, leading two of her team members, Kumt and Raynd, into it. In the meantime, Netta used the new diving equipment on the outside, a kind of mapping device, to scale the area. That was when they found it. The old contraption nearly three by two meters, a bit rusted and consumed by the algae, but there in its glorious ancientness nonetheless.

Rikku's pride swelled inside her. After so many dives and finding nothing but trinkets, they found something huge, something that looked valuable, worthwhile and definitely like a lot of fun to take apart. But for some reason, their flashlights suddenly shut off, and they were engulfed in utter darkness. The seawater was thick, and its darkness compressed her. She struggled to find her other members, when something grazed her hand. Her heart drummed out of control, and she breathed in painful spurts of air. The diving suit grew heavier with each movement, but she swam around trying to grasp something, and instead, she hit the contraption they had discovered. She saw a glowing light. It had been a pyrefly that entered right through her body and past her into the machine. Then, inertness, asphyxiation and a scream, and she blanked out, so she figured, because she didn't see the fiend that was right behind her and the streaks of the flashlights surrounding her.

According to her team, she'd frozen up and just floated there with wide eyes, the dead flashlight stiff in her hand. The water fiend pushed her against the machine, and her head hit the metal surface. She was knocked unconscious.

"You looked so frightened, and we waved at you, tried to do everything in our power to warn you, but you just didn't respond," Raynd said, shaking her head. "I just don't understand."

"It was nothing, something startled me, that's all." Rikku smiled and searched for agreement in her team members' faces. Kumt, the broad-shouldered black Al Bhed looked away, and Raynd had a concerned expression sitting stiffly on her brow. Netta stepped forward and gave a shrug.

"Hey, even defeaters of Sin have their crazy panic moments. It might be post-trauma you know." Raynd and Kumt glared at Netta with bewildered eyes, but Rikku simply became somber, stood up and headed to her room.

"I'm going to take a shower," she said with her hand tightened to a fist. If she didn't leave then, she might have punched the life out of that woman.

So much for the golden mermaid.


	6. The Red City

Oh my! The reviews for the last chapter were fabulous (seriously, I was so flattered)! Thank you so much. So! Finally, some BaralaixRikku. Whew, this chapter took me a while, but it's a nice and long. Thanks for reading :)

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**In These Walls**

_The Red City_

The luster of the multicolored stone roofs of Bevelle glowed in the auroral magnificence of the sunlight. The large steeple of the main temple still rose high in the sky, and from the ship's view as they descended, the city itself looked like a red spider prostrated on the broken green land. However, it wasn't until Rikku set foot on the long pathway that she realized how much she actually disliked Bevelle with its gaudy buildings, its over-robed people, and its particular scent of limestone combined with the saltiness of the bay.

Everyone on the ship had been reluctant to let her off. At some point, she thought she might have to twist some arms or jump off the deck of the ship. The latter suggestion made Buddy relent, but not without another reproach.

"Are you sure?" Both his hands were on her shoulders, and Brother was pacing around the bridge and muttering nonsense behind her. Rikku rolled her eyes, and scowled.

"Yes! For the millionth time, I'm sure," she said, pulling away from his grip.

"You're not delirious? Because I don't want you to come and kick my ass, because I let you do something crazy," and then a whisper, "but listen, why are you going, really?"

"I'm not delirious." She smiled. Buddy's cynical way of worrying about her was always somewhat endearing. "And, I'll tell you once it's done, all right," she whispered back, and then raising her voice, she said, "Now let me off the goddamn ship, or you'll have to get a new, and most likely not free, mechanic to slave over your babies."

They finally descended on the city, and let her off on the long bridge. She watched the ship go with an uneasy instinctual warning that told her that maybe Buddy wasn't so wrong, and maybe she was delirious. She looked away form the city behind her, where the path led into the decaying Macalania woods. All she had to do was turn around, and it would be over. But she couldn't. If she couldn't face something as simple as wandering around Bevelle on her own, then there was no way she would make it in the Den of Woe. She faced north again, the stillness of dawn casting an ethereal and spectral shadow over it, which in the desert, she would have told herself she was headed for a mirage. The most alarming part was when she realized she barely recognized anything around her.

Everything was more alien to her than it had ever been before. As Macalania's soft greens and browns faded, the red of Bevelle only grew fiercer. Even the city gates were taller than she remembered—those majestic portals to a world that she had visited many times before, but never quite explored farther than the temple. She had never even been alone in Bevelle. She had been with the guardians and Yuna, and then with the Gullwings, and it was always on some mission, but she had come willingly by herself to enter that terrible temple and find the praetor. She didn't even know Baralai that well, so why would he even hand her the spheres? The answer came quick and indignantly to the front of her thoughts: because she defeated Vegnagun (okay, helped) and saved his life. It should be enough, she thought decidedly. To hell with him, if it wasn't. Why had they even given the spheres to him anyway? Safe-keeping? It was all nonsense.

Before Rikku could knock on the temple's doors, her stomach beckoned rather loudly for some food, and food always took precedence over everything else. At least, she assumed that it was hunger, and not her nerves and anxiety at the whole prospect of being alone in that place. After a deep breath, she entered through the second set of doors that led into the city that was now awakening with the morning sounds of traffic, businesses opening and the temple bells ringing. As she walked, the awkwardness of her appearance became evident to her. She definitely stood out as foreign with her sporty clothes and messy blonde hair. Everyone was so prim, so covered up and draping with fancy colorful silks. The few early birds wandering the streets muttered good morning to each other with a curt bow and just nodded briefly to her, some holding her in regard for a moment as if they recognized her, and others quickly looking away the minute they caught her eyes. Despite them, she held her gaze forward, but stared back at anyone who gave her a moment's consideration. She was highly uncomfortable, but she was not ready to be intimidated by anyone.

She guessed that was her mistake—she decided to stare back indiscriminately with a smile on her face, and had she known that would translate into an invitation to hit on her for the two boys approaching her, she would have definitely been more careful.

She heard them stop behind her, and turn around. She quickened her step, but they kept up fairly well. One of them was constantly muttering complaints to the other.

"What are you doing?" A hissing whisper, and then,

"What do you think?" the second voice answered.

"She's an Al Bhed," the hissing boy said.

"Don't be ridiculous, besides, she's hot."

"She's practically naked."

"Isn't it fabulous?" The second one chuckled. Rikku looked down on her to bare legs, the anger rising quickly in her, and she stopped immediately and turned on the two boys.

"I can hear you, you know," she muttered through clenched teeth. Hissing boy, the shorter of the two, instantly blushed, while the other one just smirked. Both of them were carrying a wrapped bundle of books, which probably made them seminary boys, and no older than fifteen.

"Oh, I'm sorry about that. You're not from around here, are you?" A sly smile followed the question. She wanted to smack him right there.

"No," she said with a jerky shake of the head.

"I could show you around the city, you know." He stepped closer toward her, and she placed her hand on her hip—_on_ _the dagger_ on her hip. He didn't take another step. "We just want to be friends. An Al Bhed would be interesting." The hissing short boy cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably at the sound of "Al Bhed."

"Oh, I don't think so," she turned back around and away from them. She felt his hand hovering to her shoulder, and she whipped around and grabbed him by the wrist. He stared at her wide-eyed, while the hissing boy shrank back. "Don't touch me."

The temple bells rang at that moment, and hissing boy jumped up, muttered something about being late for school. She let go of sly boy's wrist, and walked away as they headed in the opposite direction, but she was still in hearing range when he said,

"I think I'm in love."

"Oh Fayth." She groaned, and wished nothing else, but to eat, find Baralai, and get the hell out.

Rikku spotted a small bakery, actually open already, serving hot drinks and morning sandwiches, and she quickly went inside. She sat on the table the farthest from the window and faced the wall. She wanted the decency of privacy, if only for a moment.

"New to the city?" A woman holding a small menu approached her. Rikku simply stared. "I mean, you look kind of disturbed." Rikku chuckled nervously and thanked the woman for the menu. Gripping the small piece of cardboard in her hand, she sighed. The curves of the glossy black handwriting made the letters unrecognizable symbols. Without giving it a second glance, she placed the menu on the marble-top table and rubbed her face with her hands, attempting to ease her expression into something more relaxed, amicable, and, of course, less readable. But she couldn't avoid the feeling that had overcome her mind.

"Tidus was right. I do hate this city," she whispered to herself.

"Really? Is it that bad?" A male voice asked from behind her. She nearly jumped out her chair. "Oh, Yevon, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you like that."

Rikku whipped her head around to find tall and prim Praetor Baralai giving a short wave to her. This was bad news and good news. She would focus on the good news for now. It meant she didn't have to walk inside that temple's foggy labyrinth halls searching blindly for him, or worse, actually have to request to see him. But then again, maybe she couldn't ignore the bad news. The bad news was that she had completely made a fool of herself and was now blushing in front of the man, out of whom she would soon ask for a major favor, like she was some stupid hormonal girl. When was Yuna when you needed her? She definitely should have picked up some tips on politics and all that from her cousin.

"Long time no see," Rikku said after an awkward pause. "Want to sit?" She offered, and he gladly took a seat across from her. Her mind immediately started devising some kind of plan to bring up the subject of the Den of Woe effortlessly.

"Sorry about that. I was surprised when I saw you rush in here and just wanted to see if you were okay," Baralai said with an apologetic tone of voice. Rikku had forgotten how nice and polite he was, a certain contrast to the two teenage perverts and a definite stark contrast to any man she had grown up with, but then again, the brusqueness of the Al Bhed manner comforted her much more than courteous consideration did. It was not that he intimidated her, but his culture certainly did. Even though she had liked him the moment she met him—he didn't have the creepy Yevon vibe—he was still deeply connected to this city. And it's not that she was prejudiced, but she had never quite liked brown eyes. People always gazed into the eyes of the Al Bhed, and when seeing the spiral pupils, they would stand back as if they had discovered they were some kind of beasts. She had the same reaction when she met dark brown eyes, like Baralai's, for the first time. She was distrustful of their shadow color, like a muddied surface constructed to hide the person's intentions.

Some of her old paranoia still lingered in her.

"I looked scared, huh?" Rikku smiled, stalling while her embarrassment receded.

"A little. Are you here by yourself?" He asked, but before Rikku could answer, the baker woman had returned with two cups of hot tea.

"On the house," the woman said with a wink. "Glad you found a friend," she added to Rikku. Her skin was nowhere near as dark as Baralai's, but it still had that russet glow that she had always envied. It was subtle, and though the old woman had brown eyes too, she was about the only inviting aspect of the city so far.

"Thanks." She took a sip, and it was just the warmth she needed. Baralai drank some of his tea too, still watching Rikku observantly. His dark eyes intently focused on her face as if he had never really had a chance to properly inspect her before. "Oh, your question, yeah, I'm here by myself," and before he could talk again she said, "And sorry about that comment, you weren't supposed to hear that."

"No, it's all right. I can—" he stopped, but changed his mind and continued, "I can imagine that it wouldn't be a pleasant place for you given the past."

"Oh, it's fine." She shook her head, and then quickly looked away from him for moment. She had grown too uncomfortable with his gaze not to mention it. "Do I have something weird on my face?"

His eyes widened, and he nearly dropped his tea. He quickly cleared his throat, straightened his back stiffly and looked down at the nearly disaster-ridden cup. The muscles around his dark brow tightened, and he shook his head. She realized she had completely embarrassed the heck out of him, and she was all the more glad for it. They were on even-ground.

"No, not at all, it was--" Mouth shut abruptly and he appeared to search around the room, looking to catch the words that weren't coming out of him. He finally faced her again with an awkward smile. "I didn't notice I was doing that. I guess I'm just curious why you're here."

"You mean, why an Al Bhed, especially me, would ever come to a city like Bevelle." She had the upper-hand, and she knew it.

"No, there are Al Bhed people in Bevelle, finally. Still a minority, but things are improving," he said, discomposed still, but not avoiding her eyes.

"That's good, I guess." She was partly trying to praise him and partly trying to appease him, because his own awkwardness was seeping into her.

"But then, you didn't come to Bevelle on holiday, did you?" He sipped his tea again, growing more comfortable, his eyebrows raised and his boyish glare with a hint of curiosity back in his russet eyes. One little praise and, suddenly, he had the upper hand again.

"Actually," she said, but hesitated, thinking of how best to put it. "Is Nooj in town?" It was the best she could come up with. So much for being smooth, but she still had a chance to salvage it. Her question puzzled Baralai, but he nodded.

"Well, yes. I suppose you don't know then." Baralai proceeded to explain to her that the Youth League had set up a sort of branch at one of the buildings in Bevelle, which was where Nooj took residence most of the time (and consequently Leblanc had moved to the city too, he said with a slight chuckle), even though the new Youth League headquarters remained in Kilika island. Nooj appointed Lucil, Commander of the Youth League, in charge of the Kilika headquarters. The Meyvn saw a better balance between the two groups this way, and so things in Bevelle were flourishing despite the usual arguments (an almost inaudible grunt) that would happen during council meetings and senate appeals.

"And I've just bored you to death with all this," Baralai added, and for the first time touching the roll that the baker woman had brought him. Rikku had eaten heartily while he talked, and so as long as her stomach had been entertained, she was fully able to pay attention, though anything political was usually too dull for her. Baralai had become incredibly animated during his talk, eager to share how much Bevelle had changed and how much, he, himself, was doing to renovate and reform the old religious institution into a social and somewhat secular organization. It kind of made him a bit charming.

"No, I think it's great," Rikku said almost with a full mouth, and quickly closed it. This was what courteous consideration did to her—it caused her to watch her every move she made. And of course, Baralai laughed, and consequently, Rikku became mortified.

"Sorry, I should let you eat," he said. She cleared her throat, and the mortification ebbed back into her mind.

"Oh no, it's okay." She wiped her mouth with the top of her hand. "I'm pretty much done."

"Here, Praetor, the usual to take home," the baker lady came again this time with a small brown box.

"Thanks, Hella," Baralai said. Rikku knew he probably had to leave soon and go do whatever praetors did. She was running out of times, and she had to know more about the Den of Woe ordeal, but the distrustfulness had quietly returned to its respectful corner in her mind the minute she lost the upper hand. It shouldn't have been such a big deal, but the way Hella had addressed him, and how looked so familiar with his surroundings made her shrink from telling him anything. It was a simple question too, and Rikku had never been prone to shyness, but Bevelle brought out the worst in her. She couldn't help it.

"You all right?" Baralai asked, and Rikku realized she had dazed off. Minus four smooth points for her.

"Oh yeah." She winced slightly in spite of herself. "I—well," Rikku began, but couldn't finish. It wasn't like she was asking him on a date.

"Praetor," a high-pitched voice called to him. A tall older woman, wearing a thick red robe with arabesque designs on the borders of the fabric, approached their table. A young woman stood next to her, wearing a light green flowing dress with a golden vest tightly fitted around her chest. Rikku immediately sank back in her seat at their presence. The city was already plotting against her.

"It's so good to see you this morning," the older woman said with a bow, and the younger one nodded slowly. They had similar features, the same uplifted round tip of the nose and the same cat-like blue eyes.

"It's good to see you too, Lady Jezel," he said to the mother, and then turning to the daughter, "Arista." Neither of them had a stolen a glance toward Rikku—neither wishing to acknowledge her presence, and before Baralai could mention any introductions, Lady Jezel had begun speaking again.

"You must come to dine with us this weekend. It would be a pleasure to have you, won't it, Arista?" The daughter nodded. "I've always thought you must be lonely, Bevelle being your hometown, but with no family, just old priests and politicians. I simply can't have that. Do promise to come dine at our home. Arista, here, is a great host." At this Arista blushed and smiled shyly at Baralai, who in turn, stole a pleading glance toward Rikku.

"Oh, unfortunately, my friend is in town," and motioning with one hand toward Rikku, "the Lady Rikku, High Guardian of Spira." Two pairs of eyes gave her a slow side-glance. Rikku flinched when she heard her title, bit her lip, and waved a short hello when the two women fully turned their heads and set their attention on her. Jezel tipped her head to the side, glared at Rikku's shoes under the table and then at rest of her, and with jaw-clenched smile, she bowed politely.

"It is an honor," she said while her daughter followed with a bow as well. Jezel turned back to Baralai. "It's a pity then, maybe some other time." Both of them bowed again at Baralai, and after one last side-glance from Jezel, the two women moved on to the counter to talk with the baker woman.

Their obvious jealousy projected on Rikku turned into an insurmountable impulse to laugh. Rikku stifled it, emerging only as a few choked giggles, and Baralai simply shook his head.

"What's so funny?" he asked, a perplexed expression set on his brow.

"I just never thought of you as a big wanted bachelor, but I guess you are the handsome Praetor of Bevelle." She wiggled her eyebrows, while glancing at the two women and then back at Baralai. She pressed her lips together to resist cracking up again.

"That's not funny," he reproached with a half-grimace, half-smile. "It's kind of embarrassing."

"If you say so." Her giggles had gotten loud enough that some people began to stare at them.

"I think we should leave. I think you're about to have a fit or something," he said. She nodded and quickly ran out, letting the laughter burst the minute she stepped outside. A few heads turned, but most of them went on their way.

"Oh Fayth, I'm sorry. I have no idea what came over me," she said, shaking her head, yet still laughing. Baralai finally laughed himself.

"Well, you just saved me from dinner at their place, so I suppose I owe you one, well probably much more than one. By the way, how long are you staying?" he asked her, and she immediately remembered what she was about to say before the two women interrupted them.

"Not long. I heard about a meeting on the Den of Woe, and I wanted to know if I could be a part of it. Yuna told me about it, well, actually it was Wakka. It doesn't matter and it's okay if I can't and it's a closed meeting—I mean—I understand and all." Her speech was fast, but it was the only way she could manage since it had all come out so suddenly. Baralai looked on with a continually puzzled expression, but his facial features relented to a smile and finally, a nod.

"Sure, how could I say no to 'Lady Rikku'?" Well, that was easy, much easier than she thought it was going to be.

"Don't start that again, please. Just Rikku."

"Okay then, Rikku, the meeting is actually tomorrow. Where are you going to stay?"

he asked, but didn't wait for the answer. "We have lodging rooms at the temple if you…" Rikku shook her head.

"No temple. Inn please." Baralai cleared his throat, and nodded at her.

"Right, there's an inn close to the senate building, where the meeting will be held. I'll take you there." He stretched his arm in the right direction.

"Perfect," she said, and became amazed later at the kind of humbling power of the Praetor walking next to her had on the crowds. The alien city remained just that, but at least she had, unexpectedly, a friendly companion to escort her, whom she was slowly beginning to trust, if not out of his assumed gratefulness, then out of his more laid-back display of before.


	7. Of Fire and Light

Another "chapter" and I'm sorry the beginning has been so slow, and that there's so much exposition, but it really is my favorite part. I have good news though, we meet Gippal next chapter, so he's always fun. We're getting there slowly. I just love these characters too much not to dwell on them a bit. I know you're reading and I love you for it, but if you have time, please review. I'm feeling a bit insecure and want to know whether I'm boring you to death or actually doing something good. For those that have reviewed, you have made my day every time. I promise that it gets so much better and fast-paced after this.

_--- _

_Of Fire and Light_

Rikku lay in bed, trying to put her mind at ease and trying to forget that the room in which she slept, blue walls stenciled with golden designs and its windows draping with thick blue curtains, was undeniably one in Bevelle. After Baralai left her at the inn, he promised to come by at night and show her a little bit of the city that she may have never seen. An uncomfortable feeling arose from the proposition, because in truth, she didn't want to change her mind about Bevelle; she didn't think she could. However, the fate of the spheres was in his hands, so she couldn't entirely say no to him. Actually, when he asked, there was a twinge of excitement, and she impulsively said yes. It was only the afterthought that brought on all her dread about the coming night.

But she finally hushed her thoughts after a good hour of tossing and sprawling in several different positions on the bed, and she finally came to the conclusion that she might as well go for it, because there was nothing she could do to avoid it anyway. Besides, too many others things were distracting from the much-needed slumber after slaving away over the Gullwings' engines all night. In her half-sleep blurry-eyed state, the pottery on the table across from her bed shook and spun, and the red curvy designs on her blue bed sheets slithered up to her, wrapping around her neck. After a few attempts of ridding her imagination of these visions, she finally succumbed to her exhaustion and awoke from a dreamless sleep a few hours later. Not feeling all that rested, she decided to shower and rejuvenate herself. She took careful note of what she would wear, but no matter what she picked, nothing in the world would ever make her less of a sore in the city of Bevelle. She didn't have the benevolent and loved-by-all Yuna on her side to distract attention anymore.

Baralai agreed to meet her at the inn at sundown, and dressed in her jean skirt and button-up shirt, she sat in the lobby in a small corner hidden behind the marble staircase. She was a bit early, actually, neither of them had quite agreed on a specific time, so she played with the buckles of her utility belt, watching people come in and out of the inn, and occasionally stopping all movement whenever her stomach growled a little too loudly. _Maybe I should get something to eat_, she thought, but someone her interrupted her before she could decide.

"You're Lady Rikku!" a voice said above her. A woman peered down from the railing over at her. She quickly descended, bunching the skirts of her violet robe in one hand. "I'm so happy to meet you." Rikku stood up and chuckled awkwardly.

"How did you know?" she asked the young woman. She had auburn hair tightly wrapped into a neat bun, a cordial smile and a knowing glint in her blue eyes, and freckles that gave her a more youthful appearance.

"Oh, I know all about the famous people in Spira, especially someone like you, but you do kind of stand out in these surroundings." She glanced all around her and smiled again. She said it so simply that it surprisingly implied no mean-spiritedness. "My name is Castalia. May I ask what brings you to Bevelle?"

Before Rikku could answer, she saw Baralai, through the railing of the staircase, enter the inn, and she raised her hand to catch his attention. Baralai smiled as soon as her saw her, and headed to the corner of the stairs. Rikku turned back to the woman, who observed Baralai closely and then faced Rikku again with a bow and a smile.

"I see your company has arrived," Castalia said. Once Baralai reached them, she bowed both to greet him and excuse herself, and left them.

"I see you met Castalia," he said as they exited the inn.

"You know her?" Rikku asked, following him, unhesitant, but without any idea of where they were going.

"She's the editor of the Spiran Triune, a network of newspapers and the first free press of Spira," he said as he led her through the lighted streets of nighttime Bevelle.

"Ah, that explains how she knew me," Rikku said. Baralai regarded her for moment, before commenting.

"I take it not many people recognize you. I would think they would."

"Oh, with Yuna around, there's hardly any room for anyone else." She stopped, afraid that it may have sounded too resentful. "Not that I mind, particularly now, when people seem to be staring a little too much my way." It was odd to her that it didn't happen around him, that the one person everyone should have questioned who he walked with, was the one most readily left alone. She knew that the people they walked by recognized him, but besides a few bows or curt nods, nobody's glare lingered for too long.

"This place is like another world," she whispered, observing the women in their night dresses glide like fairies through the palatial glowing buildings, and the men standing upright in their colorful vestments, similar to Baralai's, talking and laughing while the hums and whirs of lifts rode above them.

"I want to show you something," he said as they finally stopped in front of a building in one of the main streets of Bevelle about ten stories high with a crimson dome roof and a small minaret rising from the back. It was to the minaret that they were headed, climbing a long set of stairs to get to the balcony. At first, she had feared that the building might be some kind temple, but it was a library filled with stacks upon stacks of books and scrolls, and beautiful crystal desks with people sitting at them reading quietly.

She reached the top with rising expectation, already taken with the splendor of the Bevellian streets and structures, despite her instilled intimidation and dislike for the city. Rikku could focus on nothing but the glow of lights around her, and she immediately leaned on the stone rails of the tower, slowly circling all sides and watching the tall dome roofs that rose like mountains among the twinkling of the street lamps.

"I had never seen it at night," she said absentmindedly, recalling what Tidus said about his Zanarkand and thinking it should be something similar to this sight. Baralai smiled, pleased with her reactions, and released unclasped his hand from hers, which she'd only then realized she had been holding.

"That's not all," he said and pointed to a long telescope aimed at the yellowish moon. She giggled excitedly, having heard of the contraptions, but never before had she the chance to press her eyes against one. She looked into the round lens and with a mechanical whirr, it focused on the moon, showing her its deep craters, wide mountains ranges and jagged cracks.

"This is incredible," she exclaimed and he nodded, grinning at her.

"Like the city a little better?" he asked. _Aesthetically, perhaps._

"It's beautiful," she said, gazing all around her again.

"I want to make peace and show the Al Bhed that this isn't such a bad place anymore," he said while leaning on the stone rail and looking out toward his city. The comment puzzled her at first, suspending the magical atmosphere she had been drawn into, and then she became angry. She had forgotten in his company why she had hated this city for so long. It stood for everything she wasn't and for everything her people had been discriminated for. It was to be expected that he only saw her as an Al Bhed, not his equal, but someone to be taught of the knowledge she had been deprived of. However, she was much more than his equal. She was the person that had contributed to save his life and the damn city he lived in.

"It's hardly only the Al Bhed that dislike Bevelle, and I certainly don't represent the reaction of my people," she said this more venomously than she had intended, and when he stared at her with widened eyes and growing disappointment, she regretted she had said anything. There went the possibility of getting the spheres.

"I'm sorry," he said, confused and with a somber face. She could think of nothing to say to retract her comment and so she just allowed him to lead her back in silence to the streets.

"I'm sorry I offended you. It wasn't my intention," he said, meeting her gaze for the first time since in a way that only worsened her guilt.

"Wait," she said as they were about to head out of the minaret.

"It was really nice of you to do this, and I nearly had a conniption on you about it." Smiling, she added, "I'm sorry. I haven't been myself, and of course that sounds like a lame excuse and I also sort of lied to you, because," she stopped. She had no idea what she was saying anymore. "_Cred_," she whispered.

"Rikku, why are you really in Bevelle?" he asked her while searching her gaze for a clue.

"It does have to do with the Den of Woe, but I don't really want to go to the meeting. I didn't know what else to say, but really, politics bores me to death. That's Yuna's thing." She cleared her throat. "I need the spheres for the entrance."

"Okay, but why?" He ran his fingers through his silver hair, his brown eyes laden with confusion.

"I want to camp out in the Den of Woe for a week," she said decidedly. Baralai regarded her for moment, as if waiting for her to continue. She remained quiet, her smile trembling with a bit of embarrassment.

"You're not joking," he finally uttered. "Yevon, that's—" he cut himself off.

"Insane?" she said, cocking her head to the side. "Yeah, I get that a lot lately."

"No, well, yes," he said and then after a sigh, "why would you ever want to go back there?" She told him about her thunder phobia and about the Thunderplains and her success in beating that fear.

"I don't want to go back there, that's the point," she said. He shook his head, still not comprehending. "I mean that I'm scared of it and if I don't get over it, I won't be able to…" She trailed off, but Baralai seemed to finally understand or relent, and didn't press it any further.

"We're planning to demolish the place. We're not like you, you know. We just want to get rid of it. There's other reasons, but, well, I'll fight to delay it and lend you the spheres." Rikku sighed with relief, hugged him, thanked him, and he promised to meet with her again tomorrow evening. He laughed awkwardly at her embrace, but she had felt too thankful to mind it.

---

Five years ago, he would have never thought he'd be sitting in a conference room with a senator and other prominent representatives of Spira, and even more as a praetor no less of the religion he had disliked all his life. It amazed him how one moment could change a person's entire outlook. Everyone in this world always faced death, but the kind of betrayal and death he had seen over three years ago in the Den of Woe had been something completely different. After that, he needed to find some kind of purpose or he would sink in his own desolation, wandering aimlessly without anything left to fight for. He joined the Crimson Squad, because he thought it would make a difference, because he thought he didn't need an ounce of Yevon's teachings to defeat Sin. What they needed, he said to himself back then, was an army. The Crimson Squad was supposed to be that army.

Baralai's father had been one of those unsuccessful summoners. He set out on his mission when Baralai was only six during the times of Lord Braska. His family had been one of those pure blood believers, clean and blindly devoted, just how Yevon liked them. To hell with Yevon, he had said after his father hadn't returned. Perhaps it was out of shame, but most likely, because he wanted his father back.

Then, when his mother died near his fifteen birthday, he called it quits. No more Yevon. No more belief in anything. There was just killing and no reason behind it. The maesters were all liars that consumed people's hope like nourishment for their lies. He would have done anything to stop Sin, but the Crusaders were out of the question. They didn't accept him either, because they knew he was not only the son of a failed summoner, but a juvenile delinquent that had tried to deface, on several occasions, the holy temples of Spira (it had only been Bevelle, where he was born and lived all his life).

But then, the Den of Woe happened, and it was like that place just drained any determination from them. They had survived and made it out, but only to learn about Mi'ihen and get shot by Nooj, who at the time was possessed by a thousand year-old spirit, though he didn't know it, and he supposed had he known it, he wouldn't have hated Nooj any less for it. Everyone went his or her way, but he couldn't just stand by and do nothing. There was not only corruption in Yevon, but they also had a weapon bigger than anything he'd seen. Did they know? Would they use it? He would stop it, no matter what. Those dark, but good intended, feelings led him to Seymour. Baralai's sole mission was to infiltrate Yevon, undo it from within, until he could find Vegnagun and defeat Sin once and for all. And then Seymour turned against Yevon, and he was left with nothing. He was completely lost and he wondered for a few months around Spira, and then he heard of the Youth League forming. The people needed a new hope, and Yevon was completely dried out. He was glad, but the group was violent and when he heard about Nooj, well, he felt even worse.

One day in Bevelle, he heard two people arguing, one of them was a youth league member. He said Yevon had been nothing but lies and Spira needed a reformation, a clean start without the naiveté and dirt of religion. For some reason, Baralai snapped.

"Yes, Yevon was rotten! Yes, they contributed to the cycle, but it was faith that helped those summoners bring you the Calm each time! It was faith that brought you the peace you have now. You're going to strip Spira of that? Then it'll be all the worse for it. Then you're no better than Yevon!"

The man quieted down and walked away thinking Baralai nothing but an eccentric Yevonite. It was that fateful day when a priest approached him and his ideas for a true reformation were born.

"That place meant the death of a lot of soldiers. The Crimson Squad was nothing but a way to get rid of loud 'unfaithfuls.' Now, it's causing odd rumors around Mushroom Rock and Mi'ihen and I say the only way to stop it is to burn it down." Nooj spoke, and like always, he had that command that made everyone listen. However, one person in the conference did not agree still. Since, the New Yevon council felt that Baralai had been too involved and therefore had a conflict of interest regarding the matter, they had sent an extra representative with the permission of the Senate and the High Council of Current Affairs.

"We must preserve the small treasures of Spira. I would think that the Meyvn, who for so long has emphasized the importance of history, would agree," high priest Michel said.

"And I would think New Yevon would be a little afraid of the rumors surrounding this cave of a new religion rising," Nooj countered and the man's mouth stayed shut.

"Any others," the senator, head of the council, asked.

"The occurrences of the cave are well documented in its spheres and those of us that survived can do better to give our own accounts. I think that is enough preservation of history without keeping the cave open and potentially endangering others." Baralai was always the compromiser. He found a way to make it work somehow. That skill definitely took a lot of practice, because his old stubbornness would have spoken for him instead. Now all that was left was to talk to Nooj and convince him to delay the demolition for a week or two.

"All right, I think discussion is done for now, all in favor?" The senator inquired and all raised their hands, but the high priest. "Motion approved by majority. It's settled. Meyvn Nooj and Praetor Baralai, since this regards you so personally, I will leave you two to work out the details with the Machine Faction."

It was just another day in his life of politics, except that for once, he wasn't striving for the general good, but to help one person. There was something incredibly satisfying about that thought.


	8. Chasm

Hello my dear readers, it's been a week I know. I'll probably be updating in weekly doses because I have a ton of papers to write, and novels to read, and a story to hash out in less than week. So my creative juices will be sucked up by everything else. Thank you so so much Black Eyed Mistress. Your reviews were amazing! And don't worry, there's a lot of Gippal goodness to come. I'm sorry if there's any confusion with the chapters. It'll be a bit like that, because you won't get the whole picture in one chapter. : )

_--- _

_Chasm_

Five hours—she knew she should have preoccupied herself in a better way, and several times she thought of walking over to the senate building, but she could not and would not expose herself like that. She had to trust Baralai—no—she had to hope that he would do as he promised and somehow delay the imminent collapse of the Den of Woe, and allow her to have the spheres. Five hours to fret and nothing to do, and several times she mused whether to head north to visit the other parishes that made up Bevelle, but each time she would reject the notion. There was no way she would wander deeper into Bevelle without so much as an escort, or a wig, and maybe one of those curtain-robes.

One of those hours was spent meandering from shop to shop, glaring at a pair boots she could decidedly not afford, and several racks of Bevellian dresses, a few of which she picked up and held against her body in front of a mirror. They caused ripples of comical images in her mind, followed by her own laughter and, consequently, the reproachful looks of the retailers who knew that she was not there to buy anything.

Three hours were spent in the library. She picked up a book from the methodology section, which she found drier than the current heat of Bevelle. She put it down and opted for something else, a recounting of some mythological story of a war that supposedly occurred two thousand years ago. However, around page twenty, Rikku realized that she couldn't read for leisure, because it required staying put for too long, and she was too uneasy to begin with. She decided to leave the library for certain when she dropped three books trying to put hers back, and the sound of her slight accident echoed to every ear in the library causing another set of reproachful expressions and a scoff from some young woman at a desk, who muttered under her breath "stupid."

So before noon, she sat the lobby of the inn, waiting for Baralai to show up, who had promised to meet her at his lunch hour, after the meeting was over. As it neared half past twelve, she left the building, too anxious to wait for him inside. Her heart nearly rose in her throat when she saw his outline in the distance, the handsome dark of his skin glistening under the sun, and as soon as she could make it out the smile on his face, her tension eased, gaining the courage to run toward him.

"So?" was her nervous greeting.

"All right," Baralai said to her. "I convinced Nooj that the Machine Faction will need a couple of weeks for planning and that since you were in Bevelle, there was no better person to hand the spheres to Gippal than you. I've bought you some time, but I'm afraid Nooj already informed Gippal about it."

Rikku simply stared, absorbing all the information, and then she embraced him, jumping excitedly. "Oh you did it, you did it!"

"We'll have to tell Gippal something regarding why you need to hold on to the spheres for bit," Baralai added still hesitant of her sudden celebration. She released him and met his serious stare with a smile.

"Oh, don't worry about that! I'll take care of it, no problem." She winked, and he shook his head with a light laugh.

"Well, I suppose so. Oh, Yuna called, and thankfully I answered. I told her I hadn't seen you since yesterday, which was the truth."

Rikku grimaced. "She gave you a lecture, didn't she?"

"Actually, I told her I had a meeting and kind of," he paused and swayed his head to the side, "err, cut her off." Rikku laughed at his mischievous frown, and then his boyish shrug that automatically unthreaded that Yevonite uptightness she had expected from him. Rikku couldn't have mustered a better plan, and she would have never succeeded at tricking Nooj. If she thought Baralai would be uptight, then Nooj would be unmanageable, and she would have probably been right about the latter. It was so much better that Baralai had handled everything.

"Rikku," he said as the mood turned somber. "I know I don't have to warn you about the dangers of that place, but be careful. There have been some rumors of someone wandering around there, causing some problems to travelers of Mushroom Rockroad." The way he stared at her so intently, brow tensed and jaw tightened, took her a little aback, but as if he noticed this, he added, "Yuna will have my head if something happens to you." Rikku grinned.

"Don't worry. There will be no decapitation on my behalf." She took the small bag of spheres and placed it in her travel pack. She planned to set out right away, and Baralai was too busy to bother him anymore. "By the way," she said as she slung her pack over her shoulder, "do you usually lie to the leaders of Spira like that?" The tension in his eyes eased, and he shook his head at her.

"Look who's talking. Besides, if Nooj knew," he paused, "well, he's Nooj," he said his eyebrows slightly raised and boyish smile on his face. "But, are you setting out right now?" Rikku nodded. "No, that's no good." He grabbed her arm and led her out of the inn. "We'll have lunch, get you provisions, and then you can set out."

After packing her things, having lunch with him, and being supplied with some provisions (thanks to Hella), she gave her thanks and said goodbye to him. She headed south, encountering a few fiends and some people she knew, and avoiding occasional comm. sphere calls from Yuna at the inns she stopped at. After a week of travel by foot—unwilling to pay Brother again and fearing he might have been suckered in by Yuna—she finally reached the Djose Highroad, which would lead her directly to the temple.

Rikku had never thought twice of defining herself as an Al Bhed. Before the eternal calm ever came, when people looked at her all they saw was an Al Bhed. She was the image of the blonde desert-dwellers, the machina exploiters and the unfaithful of Yevon. That is what her lush verdant eyes and their black swirled pupils stood for. That is what her skin tone combined with her light blonde hair stood for. That is what her clothes, those synthetic anti-inflammable mechanic suits, stood for. If she ever exited her circle, she ceased being the 'princess of the Al Bhed,' daughter of the leader that united them after the Great Dispersal, and instead became a symbol of everything that was wrong with Spira. She had been used to that, but she knew that back at Bikanel with other Al Bhed, they would know her and she would know herself. By the their tone or their accent, she'd be able to tell if they came from the desert like her or an island, or north from the mainland. By their clothes, she would know what they did. Whether they worked under water as scouts, or as diggers, mechanics, riders, or developers.

In Bevelle, she could tell from people's stares that they knew she was an outsider and that they knew she didn't belong in the city. Her garments, her mannerisms and even her walk were all different. She had wanted to disappear until Baralai met with her, but even then, noting his dark skin tone, his soft silver hair—not marred by the harsh sun of the desert like hers—and the thick colorful layers of his clothing, she felt alien.

When she entered Djose, she expected it to be an extension of the desert and her old home. She expected to find herself in territory she understood and would be comfortable in. This place she could handle, she had told Baralai. But when she entered, she found herself lost. All the faces looked the same and all the words sounded similar. She couldn't tell any of them apart, and she couldn't tell herself apart from them, save for the sudden awkwardness she felt by being in there.

It would have been easier to stop and ask someone where Gippal was at, but instead, she wandered the familiar halls, blending in as an unquestionable presence, and at the same, standing out as someone that didn't rightfully belong there. Some, she thought, may have even recognized her, but they said nothing and let her dwell as she wished. Finally, she heard Gippal's voice, echoing from deep into the temple in one of the rooms that used to be the priests' quarters.

She peered into the room and found him there, busy talking with Nhadala about papers and blueprints. She had caught them in the middle of their discussion about the progress of the reverse-engineering of the meta-racer. Nhadala was going back to Bikanel soon to start on a new project and didn't have time to baby-sit anyone anymore. Dread arose in her, and her cheeks colored slightly. She didn't know whether it was from embarrassment at the prospect of meeting her again or because she was still angry at the woman for having the guts to even insinuate that Rikku might be burnt out.

She was too deep into her thoughts, rehearsing what she would say, to realize the warning coming from the person behind her. A young Al Bhed man pushed a cart, tugging a large machine into her, which forced her to step into the room unannounced.

"Rikku?" Nhadala said with a tone of surprise. The boy tugging the machine yelled an apology and continued lugging the bulky contraption through the hall.

"Hey there." Rikku waved awkwardly, and Gippal instantly rose up with a smile.

"Cid's girl, it's about time," he said and motioned Rikku to sit in a makeshift metal chair next to Nhadala. His office was crowded with metal tables filled with trinkets, papers and tools. The multicolored Yevonite designs were fading, and a few brown rust stains were visible on the stone walls where blueprints and machina designs weren't covering them.

"What are you up to?" Nhadala asked with a curious smirk. Rikku would have smacked it from her face, except for the fact that she didn't have the energy, and indifference was better tool to use against Nhadala anyway. Despite the fact the woman always said she was too busy for nonsense, she always liked a good dramatic scene. Rikku wasn't willing to comply.

"She's here to help on a mission from a high council in Bevelle," Gippal answered before she could. "Isn't that right?" He turned to her, his eye gleaming with a shrewd expression. She took advantage of whatever he was trying to do.

"Yup! I was hired on a mission by Baralai and Nooj." It was only a small lie. She was more like a small time messenger with her own pretexts, but that sounded a lot less important and glamorous.

"Hmm, that's good then," she said in a coaxing tone. "I'm glad for you." Even though Rikku glared at the woman, she was still able to spot Gippal rolling his eye at Nhadala.

"Well, I think we're done." Gippal cut short Nhadala's scrutinizing glare. "You can leave as soon as that last team is done with the transference."

"Excellent," Nhadala answered still staring at Rikku with a dignified smirk. "Good luck on your mission," she said to Rikku and waved indifferently to Gippal.

"She's fucking insufferable," he slurred in Al Bhed. Rikku noted the familiar desert accent and smiled. She wasn't sure if he knew how much he had helped her, but she didn't want to give him the pleasure. "Typical," he added under his breath.

"What?" Rikku raised an eyebrow at his last comment. He always did this. He would do something nice for her and then ruin it with that big, brute mouth of his.

"Huh?" he asked, puzzled.

"What do you mean typical?" Rikku glared at the man, who had dropped a paper, then quickly picked it up.

"Oh you know, typical Al Bhed woman: bitchy and bossy," he said placing the paper back on his desk.

"Excuse me?" Rikku glared at him, and he fully turned to her as if realizing her part in the conversation for the first time.

"Oh, no offense and all." He dismissed it with a wave of the hand, but Rikku wasn't ready to let him off so easy.

"What, you forgot I was a woman?" She should have never said that, because it incited a reaction no woman would want. His gaze fell instinctively on her chest, and he shook his head.

"Nope, not possible." She immediately stood up and gave him a contemptuous look as she folded her arms over her chest. He simply smirked, leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head. His eye scanned her from top to bottom.

"You're sick. I liked you so much better when you were eight." She rolled her eyes. His smirk changed to a smile, the kind of smile that resulted from some small comfort in the past.

"My apologies, my lady," he said with an overdramatic bow. Rikku simply rolled her eyes. "So, you got the spheres then? Are you going to be part of the demolition?" He sat up again and removed some papers from atop a touch-screen sphere embedded in his desk.

"Right, about that—I'll be keeping them for a week, okay? Good." She turned to leave, but he raised his gaze from the screen to her.

"What?" he glared curiously at her. She turned around with a politician's smile on her lips.

"Well, you need time to plan out the demolitions, and they've given you two weeks for that, so there's no harm if I keep them for a week," she explained and turned to leave again.

"Hold up," he said; she froze, and he came toward her and slid between her and the door. "What are you going to do with them?" his eye inspected her closely. She grew flushed in his presence, heart pounding and the anxiety quickly rising to her brain, disallowing her any logical explanation other than the truth.

"_I'mgoingtocampoutatthedenofwoe_," she muttered under her breath. He scratched his head and asked her to repeat it. "I said," she spoke clearly this time, "I'm going to camp out at the Den of Woe."

The mention of the cave changed his expression entirely. His brow tensed and his lips became terse. He walked away from her, staring off to the wall as he walked behind his desk.

"So that's what it was about," he murmured, and she slowly turned her body to face him.

"What?" She asked alarmed. She didn't realize then what she should have known that he knew the minute she saw Nhadala in her office.

"You think that's going to solve anything?" he asked with an amused expression on his brow, leaning back on his office chair and glaring at her with that narrowed eye of his.

"It's none of your business, really," she said sternly. Not even her father had command on her, and she wasn't about to let some pretty-boy boss her around.

"Fine, you do whatever you want," he said after a long pause. "But first, since you don't seem to actually be engaged in anything important like the rest of us," he mentioned this as a jab, "I need an extra pair of hands now that Nhadala's unit is leaving. You're Cid's girl, so you outta know something."

"Of course I know something," Rikku answered indignantly. "I know a lot, thank you! Just put me to the test and you'll see."

"Fine, offered accepted," he smirked and that was when she realized she had been tricked, but she was interrupted before she could retract her coerced agreement into the situation.

"Oh I thought that militant _pedlr_ would never leave. I swear," a tall, svelte woman said as she entered Gippal's office, but stopped as soon as she saw Rikku. "Oh, company." Gippal laughed.

"Don't worry, Leila. Rikku's not in the Nhadala fan club either," Gippal said. Rikku simply stared at the beautiful brunette a little intimidated by her observant stare. What was with everybody eyeing her closely today?

"The Rikku?" Leila cocked her head to the side. Her large, brilliant eyes gleamed with curiosity.

"Yes, the very same, Lady Rikku, princess of the Al Bhed," Gippal said dramatically, and Rikku went over to him and gave him a light punch in the stomach for trying to embarrass her like that.

"Hey! That's turning into a bad habit, you know," he muttered and Leila laughed.

"I like her," she said to Gippal with an amused smirk.

"Well great, then you can buddy up and show her around the place. She'll be working on the meta-racer once Nhadala leaves today." Gippal glared at both of them and then with a scurry motion of his hands, he demanded that they leave. He was too busy, he told them. Leila tilted her head to side, asking Rikku to follow her.

"What an ass," Rikku muttered and then realized that he was Leila's boss, and unfortunately, her own boss too. She hated admitting that one more than when she worked for Nhadala.

"I know, he's positively charming," Leila added sarcastically. They roamed the halls as Leila introduced 'Lady Rikku'—she looked quite amused when she said that—to all the workers, while the stumbled a greeting or wiped their greasy hands to meet hers. Some of them admitted they noticed her come in with much delight, while the very shy ones, just resumed their work after a polite hello.

Rikku supposed it was only natural that they would run into Nhadala as she headed out of the temple with her team of mechanics. Nhadala and Leila exchanged what Rikku felt to be cynical glares.

"So Rikku, I'm glad I was able to see you before I go off again into the expeditions. What kind of mission are you on?" Nhadala said, and Rikku glared at her.

"Oh, the demolition of the Den of Woe, but that won't happen for two more weeks," Rikku said.

"Yes, that's right, and while she waits, she'll be taking over your job. It seems she's quite qualified to figure out that meta-racer engine," Leila added with a condescending tone. "Come along, Lady Rikku, since the VIP room is now empty, you can stay there." One of Nhadala's eyes twitched, and Leila just smirked. "Have a lovely trip back to that old ship of yours." She cocked her head to the side and waved before leading Rikku down the hall. Rikku couldn't help but laugh.

"I'm so glad you don't like her either," she said between chuckles.

"Oh, I hate authoritarian figures. They bore me to death," Leila said, shaking her head and laughing a little too. Rikku felt an unspoken camaraderie with Leila, which would definitely make the next few days she was forced to spend working for Gippal much easier.

Despite Gippal, Djose wasn't so bad after all.


	9. Little Xiaah

_Little Xiaah_

Ticking, thinking, ticking of the pencil, and three words—Den of Woe—lingered after Rikku left Gippal's office. The space felt crowded and empty at the same time. The variance between the two depended on where he focused his gaze, whether on his desk, which caused an automatic rise of claustrophobia, or whether on the floor, which had rocky indents and looked horribly bare. He had pulled off all the rugs when he moved in, and it had left nothing but a lumpy gray surface. He thought that perhaps he ought to paint it or do something with it. Nah, it didn't really bother him all that much.

The pencil Gippal had been holding finally broke under one last forceful tap against the desk. Those three little words had caused him to lose of all sense of concentration and turn into a pensive, manic-tapping idler, who had a million things to do to be wasting time on three—insignificant, he had thought—little words. But the memories came rushing back and not because of the mention of the Den of Woe. He had been expecting that. It was her and _it_ put together. It was her crazy idea that was the problem. He had compelled himself to buy some time to think of a way to convince her out of it. What had possibly come over him? The girl entered into his room, and he lost all sense of the intelligible. It wasn't his business if she wanted to go have a self-torture party at the Den of Woe, but then again, it wasn't like they were blowing it up for no reason.

_Rikku._

Yeah, she was definitely the problem. Ever since he saw her for the first time since childhood over a year ago, his thoughts had wandered back to her every so often. She was one of the great saviors of Spira—god, that thought brought on the urge laugh every time. Little Rikku, Cid's girl, a high guardian. Too much had changed since they were children, but then there was always something incredibly off about her, almost as if she could only be meant for great things, because her character could take them. The more she suffered, the stronger she became, or something like that.

She looked like your typical Al Bhed girl, except with a slightly slimmer build and a very cheery demeanor. She had the typical blonde hair and the lightly tanned skin. There was really nothing extremely special about her. There never was, except that smile. All she ever needed to distinguish herself from everybody in Spira was that smile. "I'll overcome anything," she seemed to say with her mischievous grin. And it held to be true. She had helped defeat Sin, and defeated Vegnagun as well, saved his ass along with Nooj and Baralai's from certain death.

If it hadn't been for Nhadala, he would have probably complied with Rikku's request without trying to trick her out of it. He would have still argued for old time's sake, because if her smile was great, her angry expression was even better. Still, as much as he hated the damn cave, it would have been too much effort on his part to try and stop her. But then, who could have factored in Nhadala?

"It was the best find, I agree," Nhadala had said to him. "Actually, Rikku's team, well used to be anyway, found it. That was a pain really."

His ears perked up at the mention of Rikku. "What do you mean?" he asked. He never asked her to divulge any details, because she could go on forever in that vapid busybody way, but it wasn't like she wouldn't have told him anyway.

"Well, there was this whole drama about it. I had to let her go." She had that pompous Al Bhed accent, which sounded like she spoke with pebbles under her tongue. "The supposed great savior of Spira—High Guardian, Gullwing and all that—froze up at the sight of a fiend. Well, it wasn't exactly the sight. It was something to do with the pyreflies. I don't really recall." She waved her hand, a sign of dismissal of the subject, and they moved back to talking about the meta-racer engine. However, the subject couldn't stay out of his head. Something bothered him about it, and he thought it was perhaps the old instinct returning back to him from so long ago. He guessed he'd always have a soft spot for the girl, or maybe because he could still clearly hear his father's words in his mind.

"She's not just any girl, Gip, she's Cid's girl, and that makes her very special."

---

It had been over twelve years since he said goodbye to her that day, when they were both little children unaware of everything that happened around them. She was a little better at noting the changes in adults than he was. She could easily tell when something had gone wrong, or if they were hiding something from them. She could read the older faces with this prophetic ease as if she had never been a child to begin with. They'd met two years after Sin had destroyed their old island. The Al Bhed had scattered around Spira, and—the machinamongering rats, as they were called back then—had spread throughout the entire continent. The Al Bhed people had come to call it _Knayd Tecbancym_, or Great Dispersal, when at the hands of Sin, thousands of people were lost and the Al Bhed's population reduced by one third. It had been a total catastrophe.

Gippal had been one of the lucky ones. His whole family had survived, mainly because his father had been working to uncover some machina east of Zanarkand and had taken his family along for the expedition. His father never liked being too far away from them. The Al Bhed family was usually spread out; you could have brothers and sisters and not even know where in Spira they were. His father said he had seen too many people lost that way, and what he'd really meant was that his family had been lost that way.

After Lord Braska defeated Sin and the new Calm finally came, Cid contacted Gippal's father. Cid had already become quite famous for gathering some Al Bhed, and there were rumors that he planned to build a new home in Bikanel, another desert island with a small Al Bhed colony (where both Gippal's father and Cid were born) that were willing to aid in any rebuilding. Cid wanted to bring back his people together, and most somehow believed him. He had lost his wife in the incident, but somehow that had made him stronger and more willful to gather the scattered Al Bhed back to a place where they wouldn't be seen as rats, but where they could be at home again.

At that time, Gippal's family lived in the outskirts of Luca, one of the few cities that had so many odd people that no one really cared if you were Al Bhed or not, well, for the most part. His father was employed in some kind of dig site on the coast a little bit north of the city. Cid had come to their small apartment door, holding what at first Gippal thought was a small doll in overalls, but turned out to be his daughter.

Cid set her down on the sofa, and she sat next to him with her back erect and her green eyes wandering all over the living room, taking in the old machina and blueprints Gippal's father constantly worked with.

"Vydran," she said in a low, but calm tone. "This just won't do. Take me to the desert with you. If Brother can go, I can go too." Her manners were decisive and calculated. She would always look her father right in the eyes with a sense of pride as though she were the same stature as him.

"Brother is older, and Bikanel will be a mess for while and no place for a little girl," he told her, nodding awkwardly at Gippal's parents. Gippal only stared at her from the corner while he played with a toy hover model his father had built him.

"I am not _any_ little girl." She crossed her arms indignantly. Cid cleared his throat with an exasperated expression onhis face. Gippal's mother stifled a chuckle.

"Oh Cid, she's delightful," his mother said and Gippal eyed the girl jealously. He didn't understand what his mother was talking about. This girl was behaving like one big brat.

"Why don't you introduce yourself like your mother taught you?" Cid appealed to the little girl. The mention of her mother eased the tenseness of her limbs, and a sad smile spread across her small face.

"I'm Rikku, pleased to meet you." She gave a polite nod at his parents, and Gippal had the sudden dread of what was coming.

"Gippal, come over here," his father said, and the boy flinched. "Don't be shy," he added. Gippal obeyed and stood next to his mother, possessively taking her arm and glaring at this little blonde doll. He hated dolls. To him, they were stupid and useless.

"This is our son, while you're here, you both can play _nicely _together," his father said emphatically while glaring at Gippal. The old man knew his son too well.

Rikku stood up and stepped next to him, looking him up and down and then comparing his height with hers using the palm of her hand as a measurement tool. She was taller than he had first believed, but her tiny body structure made her seem smaller than she was.

"He's only three-fingers taller than me." She set her hand down, glanced toward his mother. "How old is he?"

"Well, Gippal, won't you answer?" His mother petted him on the head, but Gippal glared at the young girl spitefully for talking about him as if he weren't even in the room.

"I'm eight," he said proudly. He thought by her smallness that the girl couldn't be more than five.

"And you're only a year older." She smiled at him with self-satisfaction.

"There, you'll be fine, little xiaah." It was her father's nickname for her, "little queen." He never understood how that didn't serve as a warning to his parents.

"Vydran, oui'na y sayhea. How could you leave your daughter behind?" she said, her small hands clasping in front of her and demanding the same kind of respect an adult would have asked for.

"Rikku, that's enough nonsense. You're my strong little xiaah, and I expect you to behave that way. Now, your father is busy. Do you want a home?" His expression was stern, and she withdrew with a quivering lip. Though it was obvious she was about to cry, she bit her trembling pout and held it back. She swallowed hard and faced him with her chin high.

"It better be the best home in the world." Cid swooped her up in his arms and kissed her many times, but she held her stiff expression of disapproval.

"It'll be the best home ever," was the last thing he said to her besides a goodbye and another kiss after talking in length with Gippal's parents.

The situation could only worsen after Cid left, and Gippal soon found out just how much worse. His mother had set up small crib-like bed on the other side of his room and moved some of his things into the small closet. He complained about some of his favorite toy machines being stored behind locked cabinets, which he could hardly get any access to, but his mother simply told him that they all had to make small sacrifices in order to help Rikku.

As for Rikku, she stood, like a sentinel, by one of the windows and leaned on the edge, her face intently watching the streets for hours. She said nothing to anyone, or hardly even moved. Whenever a loud noise would startle her, her small bony shoulders would jump, but she wouldn't look toward them. As Gippal's mother re-arranged his whole room, he could take it no longer and finally spoke up in anger.

"This isn't fair, those are my things," he protested as she put away more of the leftover gadgets his father had given him.

"Rikku can help you take them out when you want to play with them." She had begun padding Rikku's bed and folding some blankets over it.

"Why does she have to stay _here_?" Gippal sat on his bed with an angry pout, and his arms folded over his chest.

"Vun Vyodr'c cyga, Gippal, because she just is." His mother turned to him, pulling a short blonde lock behind her ear and crouching down to meet his eyes. "I want you to be nice to her, okay? She doesn't have a mommy like you and that's very sad for a little girl." His father came in the room at that moment and asked how things were looking. His mother stood up and smiled. "Just fine," she said, but Gippal wasn't ready to drop the subject.

"I don't even like girls!" he shouted, demanding attention again. His mother sighed, but his father just looked at him sternly.

"Hey," he said, but immediately softened his expression. "She's not just any girl, Gip, she's Cid's girl, and that makes her very special. Listen, I'm going to be gone all next week, and you're going to have to look after your mother and Rikku. Can you do that?" Gippal glanced toward the door, wondering if the little girl was still staring out the window.

"I guess," he muttered under his breath. His dad ruffled his hair a bit and grinned. "I hope she doesn't wet the bed and all," he added with a huff.

While his mother cooked, the little girl strode over to the kitchen and watched the whole process, occasionally handing her condiments within her reach when she knew his mother needed them. Though she was quiet, her presence was omniscient—she observed everything that happened around her with every sense. The apartment suddenly belonged to her, because her silent aura seemed to be all about it. His parents didn't exactly pay extra attention to her, but her appearance commanded a sort of reverence from them. The most remarkable thing about her, his parents had whispered to each other, is that she hadn't cried, nor sniffled. Her separation with her father had rendered her mute and still, keenly aware, but not an active participant. But at dinner, her silence finally broke and with a delighted smile, she gave a little squeak once she tried the food.

"It's so good," she said, entirely too surprised to be normal--not that he could have ever imagined eating the cooking of man like Cid, but his mother had always cooked like this, and he'd never thought of it as special, especially when she put in those green herb things she loved. His mother laughed and thanked her for the compliment. And as not to be left out, Gippal then said, "My mother's cooking is the best." A comment to which his mother raised her eyebrows at him, and then shot a curious glance at his father.

"Well, Magda tries her best, but I'm surprised, Gip, you've never noticed before," his father said with a chuckle, and Gippal felt it was purposely to embarrass him, and it did. The little girl giggled over her plate and regarded him with a devious glare. Gippal ate his food with newfound speed and with the sudden urge to get away from Rikku's stare and his parents' mocking.

She became perfectly conversational after that, asking about Luca and the rest of Spira, which she hadn't really been to and taking particularly keen interest to his dad's expeditions in Zanarkand. Gippal joined in the conversation to show off just how much he knew about Zanarkand for his age, delighted to see a clear advantage to her in this subject, but her curious glare on him had quieted him down. He couldn't stand the way her big green eyes searched his face for something. He didn't quite know what, but he knew he didn't like it.

Then night came, and his opinion about her changed. He didn't quite know how it happened, but he supposed it was her crying. He supposed anything that cried couldn't really be all that intimidating or disconcerting, though he hated to hear her sobs at first. She faced away from him, and he faced his wall. An hour after they had gone to bed and just as he was drifting off, he heard them—those soft little whimpers that filled the room like a foreboding fog. He tried to ignore her at first, but when they grew into dry gasps they became so alarming that it sounded as though she were choking.

"Stop it, will you?" he whispered hoarsely. She said nothing, and the sobs continued. "I can't go to sleep if you do that all night." He turned to face her blonde head. The sobs had become less audible and frequent, but her little body shook between the small intervals. With an exasperated sigh, he stood up, remembering his father's words and fearing he might reproach him for not helping her out.

"Hey." He shook her shoulder.

"Go away," she whispered, shrugging his grip off her.

"You're still crying." She shrunk further away from him and closer to the wall.

"Yeah, well, I can't help it," she spat out between sobs.

"Do you miss your dad?" he asked, and she lay perfectly still after that. Gippal sat down on the floor by her bed. "My pops say that Cid's a great guy, and he's going to reunite all the Al Bhed."

"Vydran's a meanie, and I don't care about him anymore," she uttered spitefully, her sobs starting up again.

"You don't mean that." Gippal stood up, and pushed on her shoulder lightly so she would face him. She whipped around suddenly, her eyes stern and glowing under the dim lights penetrating the darkness from the window. Her face was pretty, smooth and synthetic looking, and if it hadn't been for the tears he might have almost forgot she was real.

"I do too mean it," she said. "He shouldn't have left me."

"My father leaves all the time for his job, sometimes for a couple of weeks, but he always comes back. Besides, I thought you liked it here." A long pause followed his comment as her sobs grew less frequent.

"I like it a little." She wiped her tears with her forearm. Gippal suddenly had an idea, but it would take a lot of effort. He shook his head and decided to go for it anyway.

"Here, get up and help me move your bed," he told her already pushing on the small bunk. She stared at him for a second or two, and then got up to help him. "Why didn't you bring any toys with you?" he asked her.

"I didn't want any. When our island got destroyed, they all—I didn't want any new ones." They pulled the bed away from the closet wall. He carefully began moving some boxes, and quietly rummaging through one or two that he thought might have what he was looking for. Then he saw it, the one thing his mother had kept that he hadn't used since he was three. He brought out the small, worn stuffed cat and held it up toward her.

"Here," he said, giving it to her. "It's not new, so it shouldn't be a problem, right?" She grabbed the stuffed animal and examined for bit, patting it lightly. She glanced up at him with a nostalgic gleam in her eyes.

"I can have it?" she asked, and he nodded.

"Just don't cry anymore, so I can sleep." He put some of the boxes back, until there was enough room to push her bed against the closet doors again.

He went back into his bed and she into hers. They both faced each other, and he watched her until she drifted off to sleep tightly holding on to the blue cat. Then he shut his eyes and finally slept with an odd sense that something had changed.

* * *

Post A/N 

Thank you so much for reviewing. I was fangirly giddy to see two writers whom I think are the best in ffx2 fan fiction reviewing my fic (I'm such a suck-up, but I do mean it). Super Kawaii, thank you for being such a loyal reader too. I might not update until next week, so I hope little!Gippal and little!Rikku appeases you until then.

Oh, and so I got over my laziness with this whole Al Bhed usage thing...

Al Bhed phrases

Part Nine- as you can see below, there's no content essential for you to know, and you can extract meaning hopefully from context. My problem with Al Bhed is that in narration usually it is easiest to use words/phrases that aren't readily translateable, but since Al Bhed is not a real language, it's kind of hard to estimate which words would have certain cultural connotations. These are the words/phrases which I use in part nine and consider as having "cultural baggage" in my fic, and part of it is my choice to translate words like "fayth" into Al Bhed. Hopefully, this will make it clear on how I will be using it, 'cause this always confuses the crap out of me in other fics.

-Xiaah: queen

-Vydran: father

-Oui'na y sayhea: you're a meanie

-Vun Vyodr'c cyga: for fayth's sake

Thanks for reading!


	10. La Ruota della Suggestione

Oh, I know it's been over two weeks and I'm sorry. That's why I'm posting two chapters, but they're not so good and I'm sorry about that too. It's my senior year in college, so I'm getting pretty beat up with work. It's amazing I can still write a sentence with like a verb and subject. So forgive me, and I hope you enjoy these two chapters despite all that. I have two weeks left, one of them is finals, so I don't know if I'll post anything soon._  
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_La Ruota della Suggestione_

The room extended beyond him in its semicircular way, the dark wooden desk below him and below that the colorful arabesque carpet, and finally the cold marble floor. Sitting on top of the desk was a stack of paper, thick and stiff, which he had avoided as long as he could. He flipped through the text-filled pages—all five-hundred of them—once, but stopped near the end when his thumb had become sore already. It never got easier. Every time a lengthy proposal ended up on his desk, he would want to leave the post right then. He was good at his job, but reading through these dry words—he glanced at the due date on the corner—in one week was torture. Someone should have included this part in the praetor job description.

The title read, _Charter 541.2 Continuing Development of the White Lands West of the Moonflow._ The project had been started nearly a year ago with the purposes of building a great technologically advanced city, and they had recently decided they wanted to expand. He forced himself to continue reading. He needed to make sure exactly why they wanted to expand and whom it would actually benefit. He was glad for any distraction, like a hangnail or a passing noise. He was quite childish about it, but he had agreed to be praetor to make sure that Vegnagun and any other weapons like it stayed buried, or destroyed, or whatever they could manage. He hadn't seen this as part of the picture, and though he had been doing it as New Yevon's political faction leader for a while, he still despised it horribly.

"Praetor," Ellil, his secretary, entered the room after a brief knock on the door.

"Oh Ellil, thank you for the interruption," Baralai told him with a boyish smile.

"You do need to read that eventually, but I have an unexpected guest for you," Ellil said, clearing his throat and cocking his head at him. He was an older man, always robed in dark blue or black, and extremely efficient. Baralai didn't know much about him outside of work, but he didn't like to pry. Besides, Baralai would have never survived as a leader without him.

"Who is it?" he asked. He certainly wasn't expecting anybody any time soon.

"Castalia, the owner of the Spiran Triune," he said and Baralai searched his mind for any reason that might bring her to his office. He juggled in his mind whether it was better to deal with the media or a five hundred-page proposal.

"Let her in." She was an old friend, so it couldn't be that bad. Castalia came in, bright in her light blue dress, and her short dark hair glistening. She was as graceful as usual, but had that sort of devious smile on her lips, which meant she was definitely after something.

"My darling Baralai." He stood up while she moved past his desk and around to hug him.

"To what do I owe your sudden visit?" he asked after she sat down in the wooden chair in front of him.

"Oh, I'm sure you could guess. I was going to send a reporter here instead, but you would have sent him packing right away. It's harder for you to say no to me, for the most part." She spoke with that cool Bevellian accent, emphasizing all her syllables, but slurring her r's.

He really couldn't imagine why she was here. He tried to think if there was anything special on the Public Council or the New Yevon Council, but it wasn't really anything big enough for news or a personal visit from her.

"Actually, I have no idea what could interest you so much," he said, still searching his mind for something he may have missed. It was never any good if the media noticed potential news before the actual subject of the news (meaning himself) did.

"You're kidding?" She smirked amusedly. "Well, you're always a bit dense when it comes to that sort of thing. After all, I nearly had to hit you across the head to get one date." She brought up their past relationship and ever since they had cut it off a few months ago, very civilly, she hadn't mentioned anything about "them" since. Not ever.

"Oh no, I can sense a really bad question coming," he said, anxiously running his fingers through his silver hair.

"Don't be too nervous. It's just one simple question," she paused for effect while he stared at her. "What could the Praetor and a High Guardian, the _youngest_ High Guardian _and_ the prettiest, be discussing over dinner?" He laughed, partly out of embarrassment and also out of annoyance.

"That's hardly any news," he told her with a smile.

"Oh, you can't charm me out of this one. Honestly, are you two an item?" she asked, her lips pursed with anticipation. Baralai cleared his throat, feeling the redness creeping up to his cheeks and trying his best to find a distraction.

"Well, you're certainly not subtle," he added to by himself some time. She raised her eyebrow at him, but he shook his head. "It was all business, and I don't even see how that would be newsworthy. Last time I checked, you weren't the gossip type."

"Baralai, darling, you must know that if Al Bhed royalty, as she is, were to couple up with the Praetor of New Yevon, it wouldn't just be news, it would be like a revolution," she paused and then outlined an imaginary headline with her hand. "The best thing Spira has seen since the defeat of Sin."

"Now you're exaggerating." He placed the large proposal charter in his drawer. It gave him something to do, and it temporarily distracted him from his ex-girlfriend questioning him about another woman. Of all the mortifying situations he could have imagined undergoing as Praetor, this one certainly never made it to his thoughts.

"You're pretty nervous about this," she commented amusedly.

"I have no more to say to this," he said with a serious tone. Castalia's features softened as she sighed.

"All right then, off the record," she said, and he shook his head.

"How off the record?" he asked with a dubious glare.

"We're old friends, and just look at that smile at the mention of her," she pointed to his face. His brow tensed. He hadn't been smiling. He had been thrown off and possibly acting awkwardly, but smiling?

"I don't know what you're talking about." The room became warmer by the minute. He could handle a billion Youth League dissenters and overzealous senators, but he could not handle an ex-girlfriend. He laughed nervously in spite of himself.

"My, you do like her, don't you?" she asked and then pressed her hand against her mouth, regarding him like some helpless being. He was speechless. Rikku was very beautiful and admirable, and of course, she had helped save him during the Vegnagun fiasco, but that couldn't possibly amount up to what Castalia was implying.

"I think this is hardly something I should be discussing with you," he said, standing up, ready to either escort her out or run out the door. She laughed.

"Don't be so childish. Like I said, we're still friends." She stood up. "You know Baralai, if we were worlds apart, then you and her are universes apart." She told him, her face nostalgic and serious. Baralai could think of nothing to say as she turned toward the door.

"But then again," she said in a low tone just as her hand touched the door handle, "I've never seen you smile like when you saw her that day in the lobby."

After Castalia left, he pulled out the charter from his drawer. He looked at it and then glanced back up at the door. His thoughts rambled from what she had said to the small period of time he spent with Rikku. It had been so short. No one could possibly form an opinion like that so soon, could they? He placed his elbows on his desk and supported his head with his clasped hands.

"Oh Yevon," he muttered. Why had Castalia gone and said that? She had no idea the kind of emotions she had stirred up.

---

Baralai paced around the room, occasionally glancing at the comm sphere on his desk and then looking around the walls as if he had lost the color in himself and were searching for it there. He had read only to page fifty of the new charter on his desk, and had to stop, because he realized that the man heading the development was Cid, Rikku's father. After that, he couldn't read a damn word without thinking of her. Since Castalia's visit yesterday, he hadn't been able to concentrate fully on anything else either. His mind should have been busy with thoughts on how to help the instability of the newly formed senate or how to try and appease the New Yevon council without stepping all over the Youth League. His life was a constant struggle of rebuilding through compromises amidst dozens of arguments that seemed like they would never resolve. Nooj was incredibly strategic and confident, but Baralai was pragmatic. He had that air of laboriousness needed to keep a religion and newly formed political faction from falling apart.

But where was he? Oh yes, the problem behind his lack of concentration, which was a simple problem a man like him should have been reasonable and unfazed by—a girl. He couldn't stop thinking about her, and he began to wonder whether he had really felt this way all along or whether the mere supposition of it by Castalia had caused it. It didn't matter in the end, because in truth, he had no idea exactly what he felt. All he knew is that his worry over her safety had grown over night (and continued to, exponentially), or rather it had been more apparent to him, and his urgency to see her overwhelmed whatever ambivalence he had at the beginning that kept him from inquiring about her.

Baralai poked his head out of his office and into Ellil's. The old man sat diligently at his desk, revising documents and taking notes.

"Sir?" Ellil's glare remained unperturbed from the set of papers he was scanning over.

"I'd like you to make a call," Baralai said in a decisive tone, and Ellil lifted his eyes from his work and turned toward the praetor with an inquisitive stare. Baralai changed his mind immediately. It was too cowardly of him to have Ellil call for him instead.

"To whom, praetor?" Ellil asked, and Baralai shook his head.

"Never mind, I'll make it myself." He went back inside his office and shut the door. He sat at his desk, staring at the comm sphere in front of him. "This is ridiculous," he muttered to himself. He simply wanted to make one call to Djose to make sure everything had gone fine and that Rikku was okay. It wasn't unreasonable for him to make sure that the spheres had arrived safely and whatever else. He took a deep breath and touched the comm sphere. A map of Spira glowed in the screen, and he pressed the label of Djose. The screen whirred and became hazy with snow until a person came into view.

"Drec ec Ty eh Djose," a young Al Bhed said, and then widened his eyes at the screen. "Praetor Baralai, I'll get Gippal for you right away."

"No, wait. You can probably answer my question. Did the Lady Rikku arrive safe there with the spheres?"

"Oh yes, absolutely," said Ty with an eager nod. "She's working at the temple right now." Baralai was a little confused. Had Gippal asked her for labor in exchange for letting her use the spheres? It did sound like something Gippal would do.

"Would you like me to go get her for you?" Ty asked, and Baralai stared for a few seconds. A simple shake of the head would have been sufficient, but against his own reason, he found himself nodding. After a few minutes of waiting and some indistinct Al Bhed speaking in the background (of which he understood a good deal, but not quite fluently), Rikku showed up on the screen. She was wearing a blue jumper suit with a tool in her hand and wide grin on her face.

"Baralai!" She waved. "You keeping track of me?" she asked with a devious gleam in her eyes and one hand on her hip. Baralai laughed it off.

"Oh no," he said and chuckled nervously. "Just wanted to make sure everything was okay and that things had worked out with Gippal." She smiled again, and then nodded.

"Everything's just fine. Gippal is, of course, enslaving me in return for keeping this a secret, but it's no problem, I can handle him." She gave him a thumbs-up for emphasis. He couldn't help but smile at that.

"Okay then, I'm glad for you. You should come to Bevelle afterwards. I want to hear all about it," he said and mentally whapped himself. He might as well have hit on her. What was he thinking? What would she think?

"Absolutely." She smiled, and swinging upwards on her tiptoes.

"Well, then you're pretty busy so I better let you go," he said and she waved.

"Thanks for calling. I'll see you soon!"

The comm sphere went blank, and Baralai fell back against his chair. He began to play the conversation over in his head a few times, wondering what he should have said versus what he did say, as well as remarking some of her facial expressions and other details he could think about. It took him a knock on the door by Ellil to remember that he still had a lot of work to do and a meeting in less than an hour.

"Just to remind you, you have a meeting to prepare for," Ellil said and then raised his eyebrow at him. "I see your call went well."

"Why do you say that?" Baralai asked.

"Well, with all due respect, praetor, you seem very pleased, smiling and all." Ellil shook his head with little chuckle and closed the door again.

Baralai's attention moved to what he had actually been pondering for the last half an hour, and he grimaced at the realization that stemmed from it.

"Oh Yevon, I _do_ like her," he said, inwardly spiting Castalia a little for bringing this to his attention.


	11. The Room of Phantasmagoria

_The Room of Phantasmagoria_

Most Al Bhed were good with machines, because they had that cultural intuition for how they worked just like everyone else. Few were exceptional like himself, but Rikku was another race altogether.

Okay, she was more than good, and he had to painfully admit it. Not that he had ever doubted that the daughter of Cid must know a thing or two, but when she sat in front of that corrosive hunk of metal, her hands moved with graceful ease, as if she had taken it apart several times already. She worked in a dejected mechanical trance, pinpointing circuits, tracing power lines that in the eyes of the rest of his engineers had been too obscured by the salt of the sea. She knew how the current flowed, what kind of resistance it would need, and gadgets that she swore were transistors, but he still wasn't convinced. It was intuitive, but the supernatural kind, not so much a genius, but a marvel. On her own she could never invent something, but it was as though the machines had veins and organs, and she could sense its life. She could understand these corpses of the old civilizations and read their lifelines.

Most of the men applauded, a few—he could see—were quite taken aback by her, like they had never seen a woman work on a machine before. But she was a celebrity after all so he dismissed it. As for her, she indulged herself in ignoring him. She completely denied any acknowledgement of his existence, and he completely denied any recognition of her skill. They still acted as they did when they were children, and perhaps that was why it didn't bother him so much.

"She's pretty good," Tyheam, who was about five years older and also his right hand man, had said to him during a small conference in his office. "It's nice to have some one so good at what they do and so good at how the look." He smirked at Gippal, waiting for a nod in agreement.

"Don't talk about her like that," Gippal had said out of the blue. "I mean, it's gross. I grew up with her, so she's like a little sister." He'd tried his best to salvage whatever that comment had been about. Sure, he was attracted to her—any guy would have to be blind not to be. She had that overpowering energy and that magnetic smile. But she was still like a little sister, an attractive sister. His thoughts dropped the sister thing, before it started feeling like incest.

"Sister? Of course." Ty said with a skeptical expression, but at least he'd left it at that.

After Ty left, Gippal decided that the whole avoidance bit had to stop. He was her boss, and she would at least treat him like so, if nothing else. He was tired of her spoiled nonsense. He also had a plan, which would help him understand what had happened back in that underwater cave. He was mostly curious, but another part of him felt compelled to know, compelled to understand her.

"Are you going to keep ignoring your own boss?" he asked when he entered her work room. She looked up from a machine part she was greasing, but went right back to it, biting her lower lip and focusing with more determination on it. He lowered his voice, when he spoke up again. "Okay then. Well I just can't do this anymore, because I need you," he said and stopped, a devious smirk on his face, and she whipped her head toward him after his pause.

"What?" Her brow creased, and her lips were slightly parted.

"I said I need you—to start on the plans for this thing. I was going to do them myself, but you're pretty good at it." Her tensed cheekbones eased into an expression of relief, but soon after, her eyes had widened in alarm.

"Oh god, you're complimenting me. This can't be good," she said, and he laughed.

"Okay, fine, I have another thing I want to ask you to do. There's this machine part that no one has been able to figure out what it does and I don't have time to play with it." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Well?" he said. She reluctantly put her tools down and stood up. As she walked by him, he noticed a bit of engine grease on her neck and without thinking, he immediately started it to wipe it with one hand.

"What are you doing?" She glared at him, quickly slapping his hand away. He suddenly realized how stupid that move had been.

"You have this huge black spot on your neck," he said, pointing to it. She flushed, and wiped it hard with the palm of her hand until the skin reddened.

"It's gone, really," he said, leading her out of the room and, hopefully, leaving behind that awkward moment back there. They walked past what had once been the cloister of trials, and as they neared the Fayth room where the gaping hole that led them to the Farplane had been, a few pyreflies started gathering around them.

"Wait, where are we going?" She stopped in her steps, carefully keeping an eye on all the pyreflies around her.

"The old Fayth room that led to Vegnagun. We fixed the hole, mostly, and now we use it as storage. No sense in wasting space." He observed her tense shoulders and her wary face.

"Why are there so many pyreflies then?" She raised her hands to her arms, and hugged her torso tightly.

"We don't know. They've been around ever since Vegnagun, and don't seem to go away really. I suppose that it's because the temple is now linked to the Farplane," he said and then seeing her step back as if to exit the room, he added, "Is it a problem?" She straightened her back and glanced up at him with a stern expression.

"No, not at all. Take me to this thing," she said, extending one arm out for him to lead.

They entered the bleary Fayth room, filled with scrap metal, old motors, pipes and other miscellaneous pieces of machinery. They had patched the hole in the middle by nailing metal planks across it. Gippal warned her that they weren't secure enough for walking over them, so in order to get the piece they had to circle around the hole. He finally stopped in a small corner of the room where most of the old motor pipes were piled up.

"This is the piece." He picked up a long mechanical tube. It was as if he had pulled on a lever that suddenly told the pyreflies to surface out of the darkness and surround them. They wisped about the room with a fierce awareness of their presence. Gippal had never seen them act like that. He became quickly nauseated as they stood around him, and though they did shake him a bit, he had never felt a physical reaction around their presence before.

"What are they doing?" Rikku asked, her eyes scanning all around her as she drew closer to Gippal.

"You know how the damn things are. They get all shaken up if someone walks by," he said, attempting to ignore them and handing her the object. Rikku didn't take the piece, but let it fall on the ground. Instead, she continued to gaze around the room. She gasped and tugged on his sleeve.

"Let's go," she said pointedly, pulling at his shirt, but he put his palm over hers and held it there.

"What are you so afraid of?" Her hand slipped from his palm and reached into one of her boots for a small dagger.

"You can't hear it?" Rikku said. The dazed gleam in her eyes was starting to frighten him. He shook his head in response. All he could hear was the soft hissing and slight wails of the pyreflies. "The people, you can't hear them?" she asked.

The glowing wisps grew limbs from their ethereal bodies, and started materializing into shadows and finally into human figures. They were Al Bhed that he didn't recognize. Rikku's dagger slipped from her hand and hit the ground. She fell to her knees right beside it, covering her ears and flinching. She was breathing rapidly, almost hyperventilating. Gippal crouched down before her and grabbed her by the shoulders. His heart beat so rapidly that he could feel his rib cage tremble from within.

"Rikku, snap out of it, will you?" The Al Bhed encircled them, and he stood up. She had to have been causing this. They were reacting to her. He was certain of it. He had never understood the science behind those things, but he knew that they were like mediums, more than the ghosts themselves. They read your mind and produced a certain thought pervading your consciousness. He breathed in deep, trying to suppress the nausea and at the same time, attempting to quiet down the adrenaline flowing through his veins and fueling his heart.

"Get away from us," he yelled, and the pyreflies dissipated. It was an automatic response, and they were just gone. Faded in less than second. He breathed a sigh of relief and turned around to check on Rikku. He caught her figure just as it rushed out of the room. He ran out and met with her just of outside the cloister rooms, when she stopped to lean against the wall, gasping for breath. He stepped close to her, and the moment she noticed him, she backed off the wall and away from him.

"Don't come near me," she said in a low tone and looking away from him. "Never come near me." She glanced up at him, her eyes fierce with rage. He had fucked it up royally, and he knew it. He had meant to prove to her he was right and that she couldn't handle the Den of Woe, but he hadn't expected he'd be _that _right. He hadn't expected anything remotely like that at all.

The rest of the day, he attempted to focus on work as much as possible only to fall back to the image of a horrified Rikku and himself surrounded by the ghostly corpses of the Al Bhed with their strange despaired glares. Last time he checked, that wasn't how the whole Farplane and pyreflies package worked. People went there to stare at happy little portraits of their families, not be attacked by them.

He needed to purge the picture from his mind one way or another. He couldn't ask her who those men had been or what she had seen that had frightened her to the point of break down—she had made that painfully clear. He left office, resigned to the fact that work wouldn't serve as the distraction he needed. It wouldn't serve to wipe Rikku's ghastly expression from his face. He never wanted to see her like that, and he didn't know what the hell he had been thinking taking her there.

He entered his room and found Leila sitting on his bed reading some kind of newspaper. She lifted her eyes over grey jagged border when the door creaked open, but went right back to reading after he closed it. Leila was that tall, svelte and beautiful Al Bhed woman with the typical cynical attitude and focused obsessively on her work. She had that luxurious and mysterious air about her when he first met her—she still did—and he couldn't resist the urge to seduce her. In the end, it happened that she was the one to seduce him, and for the last few months they had been a fun distraction to each other. The power of their hunger drew their bodies together, and they became possessed, consuming each other and then leaving once the physical spell had been broken.

"I'm glad you're here," he told her. She placed the newspaper down and stifled a yawn.

"It's been dull around here, and all the excitement today was Lady Rikku, which I suppose—for the boys—is more than enough." He scoffed and shook his head. Rikku was the last person he wanted to talk about. Leila seemed to notice his distaste for the topic, so she stood up and walked over to him, caressing his chest as she stepped behind him to kiss his neck.

"She's quite nice for a celebrity," she whispered between kisses. Her observant eyes on him felt heavier than her lips on his skin. "She is a pretty little thing, so everyone's taken quite aback by her." She kissed the edge of his jaw and his breath deepened. "So are you, it seems," she said coyly, trying to provoke him, but all she caused was the memories of the Fayth room to stumble back into his mind. He grew desperate. He grabbed Leila's wandering hand forcefully, and then with his body, he pressed her against the wall parting her lips with his own. After a minute or two, he paused to take a breath and she took the chance to move her head to the side away from him.

"Let go," she commanded in a low tone. He released her and moved away, taken aback by the reaction. She had never acted like that before. She fixed her glare on him, and took a deep breath. "Gippal, you're shaking." He slowly looked away from her down to his hands and body. She was right. The tremble rippled throughout his skin, and he felt cold all over.

"It's nothing. It's the fucking Fayth room. You know how it can be." He moved toward her again. He wasn't going to just make fool of himself but appearing as cowardly and pathetic he must have right then. But she stopped him with one hand against his chest.

"You seem to have forgotten how we work. I don't invest any sentimentality on you, Gippal. I don't need you using me to try and make yourself whole. Go find another woman to do that for you." She smoothed down the back of her hair and adjusted her jumper suit. "I've never seen you like this. I personally hate it," she added before she shut the door behind her. He realized then how much he actually hated her, and hated their whole relationship, or lack thereof. It wasn't a surprise to him though. He hadn't noticed before only because most of his relationships had been the physical kind, not as much as with Leila, but still without a lot of drama. He liked it that way for the most part, but right now, he needed something, someone, anything. He couldn't just sit in his room and tremble to sleep. Not with Rikku in his mind. Not with Leila's severe glare on his mind.

He stepped out of his room and headed to the front of the temple. He would get a hover and drive around for a while. He would forget what happened at least for the night. Besides his genius for machines, that was what he was best at—forgetting.


	12. Trembling from Beneath

_Trembling from Beneath_

It held together until she could reach her room. It held together with the glue of her anger and her dignity until the door latched closed, and limb by limb, the tumult of emotions inside her started rippling out of control. Her legs folded beneath her, and her bones thudded against the stone floor. Her chest was caving in, and she lumped forward with her mouth gaping open, and her arms, like shaking pillars, struggling to hold her up.

Her mind shut off the images she had seen in the Fayth room, but her body couldn't repress it, not at her immediate request. She bit her lip and balled her hands. She tried suppressing her heavy gasps, but decided to let them go as long as she didn't resort to tears. Slowly, her body returned under her control. Slowly, her limbs began heeding her orders, and the fear stopped reverberating throughout her body. Slowly, she lifted her weight off the ground, and it shifted from on her hands to on her knees and, finally, on her legs.

"_Dra knuiht ec cumet pamuf sa; E ys vens_," Rikku recited an old Al Bhed saying, often treated like a prayer, that her mother used to say whenever she was trying to remain calm. Conjuring her mother up through this prayer was the only sure thing to give her strength, but she couldn't help the questions running through her mind. Most of them started with the proverbial "why?" Why me? Why did Gippal do that? Why are these nightmares happening?

After convincing herself that the ground was truly solid below her, she fell on her hard bed and laid there with eyes fixed on the ceiling, fighting her battle with her mind, which wished to call forth old memories and old nightmares that she had left behind with the rubble of Home.

"No problem, I told him," she murmured thinking back to Baralai. "I can handle Gippal." She mocked herself in a cynical tone.

The more time she spent at Djose, the more she thought that Bevelle wasn't all that bad. She had only spent two days there, but they had been good days, and Baralai had been more than willing to help. He understood her. He didn't trick her, or patronize her, or hurt her. What did Gippal gain from it all anyway? He hadn't grown up at all. The Den of Woe, and everything relating to it meant so much to her, but Gippal couldn't understand. He was trying too hard to amuse himself.

She jolted up from her bed the moment she heard the steps coming down the hall and then stopping at her door. She quietly tiptoed over to it, and held her breath. It was him. She could tell. With one palm against the cold metal door, she begged him in her mind to leave her, because she couldn't do it. If he tried to get one more rise out of her, she might fall apart, and he would it see it, and she couldn't take that. If he knocked, she wouldn't answer the door, and it would only worsen whatever he already thought of her. In his mind, she was probably weak and stupid, and she couldn't afford to feed those thoughts. Her eyes filled with watery fear and anxiousness, and her hand formed a fist against the door. She took a deep breath and pounded with the side of her fist. The metal rung with a loud groan, and she heard a couple steps, and then complete silence. For few minutes, it was like that. And finally the steps began again, but each one grew farther and farther away.

"I hope you had good laugh," she said bitterly to the air.

It was their history together, her and Gippal's, that was the problem. He had some delusional notion in his mind that he knew her, when, really, he didn't know the first thing about her. The last time they had seen each other previous to a year ago was when they were ten. He didn't know her. It had been seven years. He looked completely different. She recognized him a year ago the minute she saw him. She had heard about him running the Machine Faction and felt proud of knowing him. No, of having at one time known him.

Rikku would have rather kept the fonder memories of him than gotten to know him again. She thought back to the little boy she had met so long ago, and wondered if there was some semblance of him in there. Why had Gippal taken her to the Fayth room? Nhadala had told him, she was sure, and so he wanted to see her scared out of her mind for himself. He had his laugh then. The great high guardian and Gullwing was the scared little girl he probably remembered.

During that one year that Rikku spent at his side, she devoted herself to him. Luca was full of so many different people, and the children got lost among the ambitions of the adults and the glittering lights of the stadium, so that in their innocent year all they had was each other. After receiving the stuffed toy from Gippal, she hadn't cried again, well except for those two times which had nothing to do with her father, but other more troubling circumstances. On both occasions, huge storms had struck the port and reached all the way to the outskirts. Gippal had never feared thunder and was used to it, but Rikku had never experienced it. She had been through endless of sandstorms and survived a fatal attack by Sin, but simple thunder terrified her. Perhaps it was because when Sin appeared, the skies trembled and roared above them as Sin came down to smite them. Perhaps it was because during a storm the blue turned gray like Sin's jagged skin, and the winds howled ungodly screams like those she had heard from the people dying all around her. Perhaps it was because after the loudest roar, her mother was sucked up by the force of Sin.

She hated thunder and though she hated to cry in front of Gippal just as much (she always wanted to prove to him that one year older was really no big difference at all), the tears just gushed out of her eyes and soon enough she was shaking in her bed with her hands pressed tightly against her ears.

His hand pulled softly at her arm, and she lifted her head slowly to meet his gaze. She was afraid that he would be angry with her for keeping him awake, but how could he even sleep with the constant strike of lights anyway?

"Are you scared?" He bent down and whispered in her ear. She nodded, still sniffling uncontrollably. "Do you want me to call my mom?" he asked softly, and Rikku panicked. She didn't want someone else to see her cry. She didn't want Magda telling her father about her fits.

Rikku sat up suddenly and grabbed his arms. She shook her head. "Please don't," she pleaded with him. The skies rumbled again, and she jumped toward him. The cat that lay in her lap fell to the ground beside them. She held onto Gippal tightly.

"I should call her. She would make you feel better." He insisted, but she shook her head more fiercely and tried to stifle her scared sobs. He sighed.

"Then you'll just keep crying the whole night." He looked down at her and she looked up at him. She couldn't tell in the dark if there was any anger in his features, and though he hadn't sounded like it, she still felt hurt by his comment. She let him go, glanced down at the cat and then picked it up. She slipped back into her bed quietly, and he stood there for a while and then returned to his bed. When the storm finally settled over them, a bright flash brightened the sky like day and caused a horrible crash that made the ground rumble beneath them. Little Rikku gasped, jumped out of her bed and rushed to him.

"I'm awake," he said. She climbed up on the bed and lay down. Her small hand found his, and she grasped it tightly as another flash of lightning and roar of thunder hit. He didn't protest, but gently wrapped his fingers around her palm. Through the rest of the storm, she held his hand and cradled the stuffed cat by her side. It was the safest she'd felt in a long time.

---

Rikku threw the crumpled paper against the stonewall. It had been a day since the whole scene at the Fayth room happened, and she still hadn't come any closer to understanding what had possessed Gippal to take her there. A part of her didn't want to know, so she made sure to avoid him, staying in her workroom most of the day. The problem was that she couldn't concentrate. She tried, but the ringing in her ears came back along with the anger. The worst part of it was that she didn't even remember what happened in there. One minute she was following Gippal, and the next she was running for her life out of that room. She knew it had been the pyreflies, but she was horrified at what Gippal may have seen her do. It wouldn't stop, not until she faced her fear in the Den of Woe.

"_Cred_!" she yelled, crumpling yet another plan that she had messed up and tossing it to side.

"Whoa," Leila said as she ducked the small projectile. She picked up the paper ball before nearing Rikku. "Having a bad day?" she asked while she bounced the crumpled ball in her hand. Rikku smiled in spite of herself. She kind of liked Leila, even though the woman was mostly a workaholic and hadn't really spoken to her.

"My concentration sucks today." Rikku shrugged, and Leila smiled with a curious gleam in her eyes. She grabbed another crumpled paper from the ground and started juggling the two in her hands.

"It's Gippal, isn't it?" It was a statement rather than a question. Rikku glared at her, both surprised and speechless at Leila's supposition.

"Don't look so shocked. I can tell these things." She continually threw the two objects higher and higher, still catching them and alternating them with ease. "He's torn up about it," she said, glancing at Rikku, and then, "Oh, he won't admit it even to himself, but whatever he did to you, he feels guilty." She dropped both paper balls on the desk. "His pride won't let him approach you about it, but that's how men are." She shrugged and headed back toward the door.

"Leila?" Rikku called to her, still puzzled as to why she would tell her all that.

"Call it a woman's intuition," she said with a smirk and left.

Leila was a total conundrum to her. Rikku had been surprised that Gippal or none of the other guys were all over her, but she had command over the whole place without being authoritative, as she called it. The normal reaction of most women toward someone as attractive as her would be jealousy, but Leila seemed to get along well with the rest of the women that were part of the Machine Faction, well, all except for Nhadala, but whatever her reasons, Rikku was sure they were justified. Leila was head of the main operations, so she carried a lot of weight in the faction. She unnerved Rikku in the way that someone intimidating might have a kind of negative effect on a person. Rikku liked her in a hesitant and competitive way. There was no question that Leila was telling the truth. She had said amusedly (which had become her trademark trait) as if she enjoyed the advantage of being somewhat omniscient in the Machine Faction, and even almost like a warning: t_ry anything, and I'll know_. The point was that Gippal had shown distress about yesterday, but why should she care?

"It's his own damn fault," she muttered to the empty room, but then smiled down on the graphic in front of her. She had her concentration back. Something Leila said had eased Rikku's mind, and she wasn't about to spoil it by scrutinizing their conversation. It would have to wait until she was finished.

But nothing in life was ever as easy as just putting it off, and it was only half an hour later and nowhere near done, when Gippal entered Rikku's workroom.

"Leila said you wanted to see me," Gippal said, and Rikku's eyes widened. She took it back. She didn't like the meddling bossy woman at all.

"She lied," Rikku said suddenly.

"Ah," he said, but still stood there. Rikku pleaded for him to go away in her mind, but he simply stared. "How's work?" He actually wanted to start a conversation with her. Was he out of his mind?

"You tricked me," she said as she outlined the machina piece on the paper in front of her. "Twice. You tricked me twice."

"You've proved to be quite the help though," he said with a soft chuckle and a hand behind his head.

"After this, I'm going," Rikku said, still not glancing toward him.

"Nooj would have never agreed to this. If I tricked you, then you and Baralai tricked him," Gippal said, recalling Nooj's call informing him about Rikku's departure to deliver the spheres.

"It doesn't matter. Baralai is the only one who understands anyway." She flipped the machina piece over, noting the mechanisms on the other side on the paper.

"Well, he wasn't thinking with his head," Gippal added spitefully.

"Not everyone is as perverted as you," she said dejectedly. "I'm almost done. Then I'll go collect my wages from Ty and leave today. You can have your spheres in a week."

"If I tell Nooj," he began and she whipped her head toward him.

"Don't even think it." She glared, and an idea formed in her mind. She smirked at him, and he narrowed his eye at her.

"I'm not going to like what you're going say next, am I?" Gippal asked. She dropped her pen and stood up. Her face brightened with a devious gleam.

"There's no reason for Nooj to even become suspicious, and for you to really to lie to him, if you hire me for the inspection of cave. It's perfect. I'll map out the best places to put the explosives." She cocked her head to the side with a "hmm?"

"You want me to pay you to do something insane?" Gippal stood flabbergasted.

"Exactly. It's better if one person does it, someone that's been there already. It's not a big deal," she said, but stopped when Gippal stepped forward and closed in on her.

"It's not a big deal? What happened back in the Fayth room is not a big deal?" Gippal spoke with a forceful voice and with his body looming over hers, and the air between the two like a heavy weight pulling her down.

"I don't need your approval, and it's been too many years for you to play the protector now," she said softly, but staring straight at him. She wouldn't let anyone intimidate her out of this decision.

"This has always been your problem. You're not logical. You're spoiled and stubborn." He clamped his mouth shut, clenching his jaw. "Do what you want," he added. "It has nothing to do with me." He moved away from her and patted his hands as if the dust in them were all his thoughts concerning her.

---

Al Bhed Phrases

- "The ground is solid below me; I stand firm" is my translation for that phrase, although "E ys vens" literally means "I am firm." I'm treating this phrase like a colloquialism, so it can't be translated literally, just like we can't do so for other languages. It's my effort in trying to make Al Bhed sound a little more genuine.

Chapter has been edited, so I hope it flows a little better. There were some grammatical errors that just flabbergasted me.


	13. Etched in Red and Gold

_Etched in Red and Gold_

It was a clear picture in his mind still—the first time they met again since they were children. He didn't see her at first or really recognize her until she said something—what was it—he couldn't remember. He turned to her, and looked into her eyes. A smile instantly overcame his lips. She was quite grown up in her short skirt, her daggers like claws at her side, and her reddish blonde hair messier and longer than before. But he couldn't mistake that childish oval face and those jade-green eyes.

"Well, if it isn't Cid's girl." Her features lightened up. He could tell she had been glaring at him for being all over Yuna. It wasn't his fault that he'd never been close to a _hot _celebrity before, but then again, Rikku was a celebrity of some kind too. "How's Brother?" The question easily translated into "is he still pissed," but he already knew the answer. It was Brother, of course, he was still holding the grudge—still brandishing the rusty old knife from his festering wound—or battle scar, as he was likely to think of it.

"Same as always. Buddy's around too," she said as she danced on her tiptoes and cocked her head to the side. She was really cute in that flirty, teenage way, certainly pretty, but he tended to like his women older. Still, his eyes lingered on her attractive curves and the twinge of red that emerged as she pressed her lips into a smile.

"Yeah, same as always," he said before his attention got unexpectedly diverted to Paine. The team that composed the Gullwings had been stitched with bits of his past, all bundled up into that red ship, except for Yuna, but then Yuna was part of everybody's life. She was a celebrity after all.

And when the Gullwings visited him again, Rikku was the first person he noticed. It was instinctive, if not magnetic.

"Hey Cid's little girl." He ruffled her hair, and she adjusted her headband with a pout.

"I have a name you know," she muttered, and then Yuna said something he couldn't avoid responding to. It was just too tempting.

"You two seem close." Yuna smiled while nudging Rikku.

"Yeah, we made quite the couple," he said. She glared at him, her eyes wide, and ran to him and pushed him.

"_What are you saying?_" she shouted in Al Bhed and hid her face. It was the greatest thing he'd seen in a long time.

"Ah, Rikku's always good for a laugh," he said between chuckles. He couldn't believe that the girl hiding behind her hands, blushing madly, had actually defeated Sin.

He'd heard that Rikku had fought alongside Yuna and the other guardians in Zanarkand. At first, he'd laughed. Riah, the old man that now ran human resources for the Machine Faction, had told him all about how the princess of the Al Bhed and a summoner, half Al Bhed herself, had defeated Sin, as if it had just been the two of them. It was an important achievement for the older Al Bhed to know that the race contributed to bringing the Eternal Calm. It didn't really matter to him, and at the time, he couldn't believe that little Rikku had actually stood up against Sin. Little Rikku who was afraid of thunderstorms. It didn't make any sense, but the possibility was incredibly amusing.

Then he found out it was all true. Rikku had actually become a guardian and faced Sin. It came out in the Spiran news broadcast. When he heard the reporter in her quick monotonous voice describe all about the last pilgrimage, he thought back to the last time he had seen Rikku when he had been nine. Rikku boarded with them for a whole year, and after Home was built, his parents went there and stayed a while—just a few months. In those months, he met Buddy and Brother. Taking to the older—and finally!—male companions, he totally ignored her. It wasn't his fault that in the biological fabric of his being, he had a propensity to think awfully bad of girls. They were whiny and conniving, even if Rikku was one of the more tomboyish ones. She was okay, but she was no Brother and Buddy, that was for sure. She usurped most people's attention anyway. She was the little queen of the Al Bhed, the princess. It was stifling, even though he could tell that she didn't like the attention. She spent most of her time bothering her father if not being around his mother. She didn't take to other little girls. Instead, she surrounded herself with adults.

"I heard you're leaving next week," she said to him one of the few times he had been left alone. Cid had sent Brother on some errand, and Buddy had been punished for breaking some machina at home.

"Yup," he said as he tinkered with an old toy of Brother's. She stood there next to him for a while, and then sat down to watch him. Her presence unnerved him for a moment, but then he became used to it.

"Do you hate me?" He glanced up at her puzzled by the suddenness of her question. Her brow was wrinkled, and her eyes were intensely expectant. He shook his head.

"Only you would come up with stupid ideas like that," he said, and focused on the toy again. He almost had the wheels working.

"It's not stupid. You don't like me anymore. Ever since you came here, you stopped liking me," a pause and then, "I wish I was a boy."

"No, you don't," he said, "You'd make a stupid boy." She hit him in the shoulder, and he whipped to the side about to scream at her, but stopped. Her eyes were full of tears and her lower lip quivered. Before he could muster anything to say, she ran out of the room and left him. He shook his head and went back to his work. He didn't understand her at all. But leave it to the little xiaah to go on and tattle on something he hadn't even done. It wasn't his fault that she was full of crazy ideas, and that she wasn't a boy he could dignifiedly hang out with.

"I heard you made Rikku cry," his mother said to him as she tucked him in bed. She smoothed the sheets and sat down next to him.

"I did not." It was so typical of Rikku to get all the attention.

"You should be nice to her. We don't know how long it'll be until we can come back." She petted his messy blonde head. "Would you like to stay?" She asked gazing off toward a wall.

"What?" The nostalgic gleam in his mother's eyes disconcerted him. She looked sad, and she had never looked sad before they had to leave for one of his father's expeditions. She hid something behind her soft green irises, and as she shook her head slightly, he saw her spiral pupils widen slightly, glancing past him, as if she were looking into the future.

"Never mind, sweetie. Just be nice to Rikku. You two were so close for so long," she said nostalgically and then shook her head. She kissed him on the forehead and left him.

The morning that he had to leave, it finally hit him. Rikku sat by the corner, while Brother and Buddy talked excitedly about Zanarkand and how it would be so cool to be in Gippal's place. Gippal felt her heavy eyes on them, pulling at him and dragging the sadness from within him. He had never had to say goodbye to someone before.

"You two, scurry! Let the boy pack." Cid said from the living room. He had been talking to Gippal's parents for the last hour. After the boys left the room, Rikku got up slowly and warily neared him.

"I heard your parents and vydran talking. Zanarkand is dangerous," she said.

"I've been there before. It's no big deal."

"And when Sin comes back?"

"Stupid, that won't happen for years."

"And when Sin comes back, you'll come back here?" She grabbed his hand and held it. He shrugged, and she released her grip on him.

"Probably," he said and zipped his backpack.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" She asked, and he simply looked at her. "Your stuffed cat. I still have it."

"You can keep it," he said with a smile. "I don't need it."

"It'll miss you while you're gone. You should come back for it. You should promise to come back for it, or it'll think you don't like it at all because it's childish and stupid." Her eyes started tearing up, but she bit her tongue and breathed in deep.

"It'll be fine," he said and grabbed his bag and exited the room. He set it by a stack of boxes and luggugage by the front door. She ran out towards him suddenly and wrapped her arms tightly around his chest from behind.

"Promise you'll come back for it!" she yelled.

"Rikku," Cid said. "Come back for what?"

"For the cat!" she uttered angrily, tears pushing out and wetting her face. Magda went to them and first glanced at her son. Gippal was crying. He hadn't said anything, but he was crying, silently and still. He didn't know why he was sad. He didn't understand that. He would miss Home. He would miss the little girl that had annoyed him for over a year. Magda pulled Rikku away from Gippal gently and the little girl instinctively wrapped her arms around his mother's neck. He wiped his tears forcefully as heard his mother say, "We promise."

In the background, he heard his father chuckle slightly.

"They make quite the couple, don't they Cid?"

---

Chapter has been edited. The purpose of this chapter will come much later. It's not a break in plot. I'm not very fond of linear plot, which you can probably see a bit through this story. However, don't worry, the narrative of the den of woe plot does develop linearly throughout the story, and so do Rikku's relationships. So it shouldn't too confusing. I'm staying as traditional as I can withstand with this story.


	14. I Withhold

_I Withhold_

Uncertainty was like a plague, and Rikku felt her bones and skin seething in it. It had been the clear solution in her head to all her problems, like a powerful all-healing potion, which would render her completely fear and trauma free. She _had_ to go to the Den of Woe. It was the key that would free her from her torment. She would have preferred something simpler, but she didn't have that kind of mind power that allowed you to just suck it up and get over it. She had used it all up. There should have been a button in her mind that she could press to turn off her nightmares, and, particularly, the voice that still liked to listen to Gippal. It had been tucked away along with her memories of him. She hadn't forgotten it, because it writhed out the minute he came back, but she had repressed it, because there was no Gippal to torment her with stupid ideas, so out of lack usage, the instinct rusted away in her.

But he had polished it clean with his voice. It wasn't concern, not quite, but the need to prove he was right. That's why she could not listen to him, because in the end, she didn't matter to him, what mattered is that somehow he knew her better than she knew herself. But she could use his same tactics against him. There had to be someone that knew him better than he could have wanted. Of course, none of the boys would do. No man knows another man better than himself. It is part of their innate incapability to bond with enough depth to penetrate all the male rituals and pleasantries.

No, it had to be someone without emotional baggage—cold, yet calculative, a bit like him, but not so dense, and luckily for Rikku, she knew exactly who that person was.

"Leila," she called, knocking softly on the metal door to Leila's room. She heard a slight "mmm?" coming from inside, and took it as a form of permission to open the door. Rikku entered the small room to find Leila on her bed, lying on her side, with her legs stretched out and her torso slightly propped up, like a queenly odalisque. Leila looked up from the book she was reading, and regarded Rikku with a tilt of the head, while drumming her slender fingers on the sleek red hard cover of the book, constantly concealing and then revealing the first word in the title: _Self-Sacrificing Heroes_. She finally waved a hand for Rikku to come in and close the door, and then went back to her book. Rikku didn't know quite what she would say. Now that she thought about it, she hadn't really worked out what she would even ask Leila.

"It's a good book," Leila said and set it down on the metallic black desk next to her bed. On it there were beaded mats, and more books held up by machina parts and pipes, and papers stacked next to a half-consumed tray of food. "I heard you're leaving today for the Den of Woe. Wouldn't want to be in your place," Leila said and then smirked.

"I—," Rikku started, but couldn't continue. She had no idea what she wanted to say.

"You and Gippal didn't work it out then?" She asked as if reading Rikku's mind. She was still mad about Leila's meddling on that matter, but she couldn't show it. Rikku needed information, so she looked away, chuckling nervously and ruffling her blond hair a bit.

"We—Gippal and I—used to know each other when we were little," Rikku said suddenly, and Leila set her eyes on her with an impenetrable expression. The smirk had left her face, and her brow had tensed. "It's stupid. I don't know why I take him so seriously," she muttered.

"Then don't, not many do," Leila added, and then shrugged, as if the comment had come out on its own.

"You seem to know him pretty well, so I was hoping you could…" Rikku's sentence trailed off, unsure of the proposition it was supposed to make.

"I could persuade him to leave you the hell alone? You might as well be asking me to coax him into it. Say _don't_, and to him it means _yes_ and _more_." Leila shook her head, and propped herself up to a fully sitting position. "Listen, why do you care so much what he thinks?"

"It's not that. It's that he could make my life very complicated and—" Rikku stopped, realizing that she was making up excuses. He could always try and stop her, but that didn't mean she would ever let him succeed. So he could get her in trouble with Nooj, and he could Baralai in trouble too. No, that was a problem, but still, in the end, what Gippal thought mattered. She hated the fact that he probably saw her as nothing but a stupid traumatized kid. "It's an old habit, I guess—caring about what he thinks."

"The whole childhood past thing again?" Leila asked with a bit of cynicism in her tone.

"Yup. So, what do I do?" Rikku's eyebrows raised expectantly.

"Maybe you have a thing," Leila murmured with a glint of amusement in her dark green eyes.

"A thing? What do you mean?" Rikku bit her lip. This conversation was going to the wrong subject.

"Maybe," she paused, "You have a thing for him—you know—like an old crush, resurfaced, or something like that."

"Oh, for Shiva's sake, I _do not_ have a thing for him. It's not like that at all. I just want—" she had to stop. It was a bad idea to even explore it, but the sentence finished in her mind regardless. She wanted to be seen as a woman, like Leila was, like Yuna, like Paine. Why was she stuck forever as the child? Why was she the little sister figure Gippal would forever love to torment? Her mind stopped there out of fear of going somewhere unknown. She couldn't handle that at the moment, but a light laugh from Leila served to pluck her from her thoughts.

"God," Leila said, with the remnants of her laughter still lingering as a smile on her lips. "I'm having a girl talk. It's the scariest thing I've ever done." She picked up her book again, but didn't open it. "Do you know how Gippal lost his eye?"

Rikku shook her head, anticipant of the revelation. "Do you?" Rikku asked.

"No, no one does," she said, and started on the book again, slowly lying back down. Rikku stood there for a few seconds, not quite understanding what Leila had said, but she eventually took the hint and got up and left. So nobody knew how Gippal had lost his eye. Gippal had his secrets, but how did that help her? It didn't help. Maybe Leila had said it just to bother her, or distract her, or god knows what that woman's intentions were.

She returned to her room, and said a few goodbyes and that she'd be back in week on the way there. She picked up her bag, a rolled up the tent Ty had lent her and put some gil in her pocket. She would have to buy some food in the supplies store outside of the temple. She left her room and somberly walked down the halls of the Machine Faction. The dread that had ebbed to the very bottom of her mind began to surface again. She was going to this place for a week. It was creepy, dark, damp and unpredictable in there, and though Shuyin was gone, the pyreflies still lingered like glittering ashes. She may as well try and camp out at the Farplane. Actually, the Farplane might have been better. It was pretty in there at least, and it certainly wasn't the site of a massacre.

She heard the crackling of the electricity above her and smelled the dusty air once she stepped out onto Pilgrimage Road. To her surprise, Gippal stood by the bridge talking to one of the engineers. Rikku ignored him and went into the store to manage her wages and buy some food. The store clerk already had a package of supplies ready for her, saying the faction would pay for it because she was doing it on duty. Gippal had hired her for the demolition after all. He'd caved in probably from the guilt.

She went outside again, ready to utter a quick 'later' to him and move on to her journey. The engineer talking to Gippal left just as she was passing by, and she changed her mind about even talking to him. She would just keep walking.

"Hey, Cid's girl," he said, and she stopped with a groan. She turned around to face him.

"Thanks for hiring me, so on and so forth, and I'll see you in a week." He raised his eyebrow at her and she quickly turned back to her path.

"Can I ask you something?" Gippal said.

"No," she mumbled, but faced him again despite her inner protests.

"What did you see in the Den of Woe that makes you so afraid?" Her mouth parted. She searched his gaze for some kind of hint that he was joking, but no, he was seriously asking her that. What kind of question was that? What kind of answer could she even give him? She wasn't just about to sit down and tell him. She placed one hand on her hip and glared at him. It was right then, hours later, when the conversation with Leila finally made sense.

"What happened to your eye?" She glared at him, and he shook his head as if he hadn't registered her question.

"What?" His brow wrinkled.

"Your eye," she pointed as she said it, "what happened to it?" He narrowed his eye on her and then smirked.

"Fine, point taken. We all have our secrets." He shrugged and shook his head.

"See you in a week," she said, feeling more confident with each minute.

"If you come back sane," he retorted. But nothing could bring her down now, so she scoffed at his comment and walked away.

---

Gippal wandered around the outside of the temple, occasionally grunting with frustration and sometimes outright shaking his head at no one. He did this for several minutes. His thoughts had plunged into the whole Rikku matter and how unreasonable and infuriating she could be. Did anyone else know she was doing this? Where the hell was Yuna, Miss Goody, to talk her out of insanity? The problem was not that. It was Baralai. This was a man he had trusted with his life during the most dangerous times. Gippal had always seen him as the most reasonable and composed out of all of them. So what the hell happened?

Gippal went back inside the temple and caught Ty who was running by with few tools.

"Hey, get me a comm sphere. I need to call up the Praetor." Ty nodded and a few minutes later he was at Gippal's office with the blue contraption in hand.

"You know, the Praetor called like two days ago. I was going to get you, but he just wanted to talk to Rikku." Ty said as he placed the comm sphere on Gippal's desk.

"He did, did he?" Gippal muttered absentmindedly. He felt a slight pang of spite toward his friend—he had some nerve to just call Rikku, like she was on vacation. "Thanks, Ty." Gippal dismissed him and got ready to call Baralai. He would give the Praetor a piece of his mind.

"This is Ellil in New Yevon," answered Baralai's assistant.

"Hey Ellil, I need to speak with Baralai. Is he around?" Gippal asked.

"Oh, Gippal sir, it's good to hear from you. Yes, he's around, let me inform him." The man left from screen view and less than a minute later, Baralai was in view.

"Hey Gippal, is something wrong?" He actually looked worried, and Gippal figured it was all over Rikku. They weren't going out or anything, were they? His brow tensed with slight annoyance.

"Yeah, something's wrong. How could you give the spheres to Rikku?" Gippal's voice was calm and sly, inquisitive and perhaps condescending, but not demanding.

"I don't understand what you're asking." Baralai's face hardened with a lack of expression, as a tact as politician's.

"Ri-kku, you know, cute little blonde with a propensity for insane things like camping out at the Den of Woe," he uttered as his patience continued to thin down. "You do remember why we hate that place, right?"

"I think she can handle herself quite fine. I mean, she did face Vegnagun," Baralai responded with his usual collected pacifist tone which a lot of times either eased Gippal or irritated the heck out of him. Today, it was definitely the latter.

"Yes, with Yuna and Paine by the way, not alone."

"Gippal, we're both busy men, what is this about?"

"Have you been listening? Out of all people in Spira, Baralai, I always thought you were the most reasonable, but this is the first time I hear about you not thinking with your head." Gippal smirked knowing that such a comment was bound to innerve even the most self-controlled of people. He was practically accusing good ol' Baralai of being a pervert, but the Praetor simply cocked his head to the side with an amused smile.

"You're not making any sense. She asked for the spheres as a favor, and I complied. It's fairly simple."

"I'm sure Nooj wasn't in on it," Gippal retorted, and Baralai laughed.

"You and I know Nooj and how that would have never happened," Baralai said.

"Maybe for a good reason then." Gippal shook his head, and Baralai stared with a confused expression in his eyes.

"Okay, now you're scaring me. You'd never agree with Nooj on anything." Baralai shook his head.

"On most things, but seeing her for myself all freaked out was totally different than hearing the story, you know. God only knows what she told you."

"What are you talking about?" Baralai said, his eyebrows tightly knitted, trying to regard Gippal closely through the screen. That's when it hit him. Baralai didn't know about Rikku's whole incident, and, _of course_, she hadn't said anything to him.

"She didn't tell you why she suddenly wanted to have a little camp out in that musty old hell, did she?" Gippal asked, but received his answer through his friend's somber brown eyes. He stared intently through the screen, waiting for Gippal to continue. "Less than a month ago, she was almost killed by a fiend in a cave during a dive. She completely panicked, and got herself hurt. I think she's pretty freaked out by pyreflies, and if there's something that cave is filled with, it's those damn things."

"I didn't know," Baralai muttered. Gippal shook his head and regretted using his friend as an outlet for frustration.

"Oh hell, it's only a coincidence that I know. Besides, she would have stolen the damn things if she had to. So yeah, didn't mean to take it out on you." Gippal scratched the back of his head uncomfortably. He always hated apologies.

"It's fine. It's good to know, but, has she left yet?"

"Yeah, like I said, there's no stopping that one." Gippal cleared his throat. The conversation had gotten extremely awkward and uncomfortable.

"Okay," Baralai said, then a long pensive pause, "Well, tell me if you hear anything." The screen shut off. Gippal winced. Baralai looked a lot guiltier than he had expected. He realized then he needed to rid himself of the worry over her. It was her own damn choice to plunge herself in that place, and if she didn't come out sane, well, it was her own doing. He was no babysitter.

But no matter how deep he dug to bury his thoughts on her, they still lingered, and the despaired look in her eyes, her screams, and her fear slid through the cracks of his consciousness, like disembodied ghosts.


	15. Silence and its demons

I'm sorry. I'm dreadful, etc, etc; I don't deserve your reviews and praise, and all that, and I'm an awful updater. And I'm sorry that you get these mediocre chapters for now, but I hace possibly one of the worst writer's blocks... not story blocks, but the words, they're crappy when they come out on paper. But if I didn't post something (and I certainly wasn't going to post to a journal in this state but perhaps I should have, they don't even properly reject you with a nasty review, still, I've come to rely on you) I would fall apart. I know it sucks, but I ask for your patience. And I love you.

* * *

_Silence and its demons  
_

Calm. It was an important word in the history of Spira. It meant much more than ceasefire or unexpected turbulent massacres, but that one day everything would be calm. The whole world would become still and full of that wonderful silence that meant Sin was no longer a threat. But silence is a threat in it of itself. The worst thing that could have happened to Rikku as she dreaded her trip to the Den of Woe was nothing—was a calm. It was a perfectly uneventful trip. The hover roared and the dust of the ground shook, but that was all the excitement she experienced on the way to the old Youth League Headquarters. No fiends, no breakdowns, no passerby's. Just her and her thoughts, and a very silent young driver, who didn't dare or wasn't interested in attempting to make conversation over the loud hum of the engines.

Time dragged along. The landscape was still, the white clouds still, which allowed her thoughts to run amok in her mind. They were anchored to the near future, to the Den of Woe and its horrible darkness. Her conscience would urge her on, then disagree, then despair over it, and it would continue like this in constant loop. At times, she was lapsing in judgment to the degree that she would admit that Gippal was right. But he wasn't, because though it may seem insane to him, he didn't know what she was going through. This trip was the only solution to her panic, her anxiety, and her nightmares. This whole ordeal had given her an almost unrecognizable personality. As soon as she conquered her fear, she would be back to her old confident self in no time. It had worked with the thunder, and it would work again.

She gave a sigh of relief when the old Youth League headquarters finally came into view. It had been turned into a museum and inn, where you could rest and at the same time learn about the Operation Mi'ihen tragedy and a very skewed—less than favorable—history of Yevon. She would get some water and supplies there to carry by hover to the edge of Mushroom Rockroad, where she would then have to trek by foot to the Den of Woe. The thoughts of the near future took her back to that day when she had entered the Den of Woe, very much against her will, with Yuna and Paine. They promised Nooj they would get the spheres to open the entrance, and she had been a little curious about whatever was hiding behind that complex puzzle of a door. But it hadn't been a cave at all, rather a tomb that with its uncovering, it awoke the dead that had long rested there. It awoke Shuyin and his demonic pyreflies. But what she had felt in there couldn't have all been Shuyin, because it wasn't just hate and anger that coursed through her veins, but evil.

At least, she thought that is what evil would feel like. They said that Shuyin fed off the despair in a person, and maybe it was not evil, but despair instead. It was utterly thick, and it pulsed and ached as it flowed through her. Those pyreflies pushed inside her and found the deepest place in her memories, nestled themselves there, spread like cancerous cells, and moved through her whole being creating voices, images and emotions too quick and too many to comprehensibly sift them out.

But among those voices, those faces flipping through her mind and the emotions ebbing and flowing, she heard her mother. She said, "Rikku, get out of here," and her voice filled Rikku with the memory of her mother dying, of Sin possessing the sky in a black storm cloud and the winds around them howling with people's screams. Her mother held tightly to Rikku's small body, running and hitting against other bodies, and then they both felt the suction pulling them to that monster. Her mother gripped to the first metal pole she could find and pressed her daughter between it and herself. Rikku yelped as the pain of the metal imprinting her back became overwhelming, but her mother held tighter. Rikku had never known her mother to be that physically strong. She was a thin, delicate woman—an unlikely build for an Al Bhed.

"Cid!" Her mother screamed in her ear, the roaring and howling overpowering the shrill of her voice.

"Aine!" was the distant call they heard. "Hold on!" But she wasn't holding on, her mother's grip and the pain on Rikku's back lessened with each stubborn pull of the wind.

"Rikku, hold on. I know you're strong, so just hold on until daddy gets here, okay?" Then her mother screamed. A Sinspawn grazed her back with its claw, but she disregarded the pain and turned Rikku over so that she could wrap her little arms and legs around the pole. "Grip it with all you've got!" she shouted as Rikku felt her mother's arms leaving her. "E muja oui," were her mother's last words to her.

"Susso, no!" Rikku yelled, watching helplessly as her mother let go completely, swiftly grabbing her knives and slashing the throat of the beast near them before she was pulled up to the heavens above them.

"Aine!" Cid yelled, appearing from the chaos and throwing himself toward Rikku, whose hands already hurt as her skin tore open against the rusted metal.

"Susso, susso, susso!" Rikku yelled, fighting her father, but he remained silently shielding her from the winds until they ceased and the skies began to clear again. As the screams hushed with coming light and the silence fell over them, Rikku lost consciousness. When she awoke, she was on a ship and Brother was next to her, with numb wide eyes and his face sallow, holding on tightly to her hand. The people screamed above them, "it's Sin again, Sin again!" and the ship began to rock. Both him and Rikku slipped under the bolted bed she had been sleeping in and wept silently until the roaring above them stopped along with the powerful sway of the ship. Then they shushed, shaking together while Rikku let out a few dry sobs. They were under there for hours, and it was days later when they would find out that their entire island had been swallowed and eviscerated by Sin.

---

When Rikku finally arrived at the inn, it was already nearing sunset. She knew she should have left earlier in the day so she could have made it to the Den of Woe, but there was nothing she could do now.

"You better stay for the night, Lady Rikku," Deka, the young Youth League man that ran the inn suggested.

"Yeah, you're right. How does the beach look at this time of day?"

"Quiet, and the tide's not too bad, but after sunset it gets a little violent. Are you going for a walk?" he asked.

"Yeah, I need to unwind."

The Youth League had built a sort of rocky pathway to the beach below. Most of the visitors that came by usually watched from atop and didn't dare go down. The beach was quiet and some rusty machina still protruded out from deep in the sand. Not everything had been washed up and discarded by the sea. Rikku took off her boots near the rock pathway, and walked along the seashore, her feet dunked under the water for a few seconds and her footsteps on the moist sand continually washed away with every wave.

She belonged to the sea. She could listen to the lulling sound of the tides and find comfort in it. No matter how hard you pressed your foot in the sand, how hard you ran, the sea would wash it all away. Under its surface, you could find all of Spira's history, buried and preserved there under the vigilance of the sea god.

As she walked alongshore, she noticed a figure in the distance. Something sparkled at the person's feet in the red and pink glow of the sunset. As Rikku ran toward the mysterious silhouette, she was able to make out features of a female body. The woman stood tall, staring toward the red horizon, her dark short hair tousled in black waves by the wind. She held the small glittering object in her hand, which appeared to be a sphere. As far as Rikku knew, no one usually came down all this way on the beach. Most people thought it a haunted place, teeming with the ghosts of Operation Mi'ihen and the shadow of Sin.

The woman turned toward Rikku as if she had been expecting her and smiled.

"Did that sphere wash up ashore?" Rikku asked, closely inspecting the woman's green eyes. They didn't have spiraled pupils.

"Yes, it came right to me. Would you like it?" Her tone was sultry and soft. Rikku shook her head.

"No, it's yours. Does it work? Have you watched it?" Rikku asked. Though she didn't want to keep it, she was still curious about it.

"No, there isn't anything to watch." She glanced down at the glowing sphere cradled in her arms and than back toward the horizon.

"Well, then it could be a dressphere," Rikku said.

"Lady Rikku," the woman turned toward her, startling Rikku a bit. She had no idea this woman had recognized her. "Keep it. It is not mine, but yours. I had a dream, and this isn't mine." She extended her hand out and released the sphere, which Rikku barely caught. She caught a chill from the sea breeze as the woman turned away from her.

"Wait, what are you talking about?" Rikku yelled after her. The woman continued walking until she reached a brush at the end of the beach and disappeared through the thicket. The sand suddenly seemed alien and glossy under the sun's glow. She needed to get away from the beach. She put the sphere away, because it kept picking up the sunlight like a magnet.

"Only me. Only this kind of crap happens to me," she muttered and pouted looking at the strange sphere in her hands. "Now I know how Yunie feels. Some people are creepy."

Noting that the tide had risen some since she began her promenade, she turned back, not willing to chase after the woman. It had been a harmless gift after all, and maybe she could get use of it. Too tired and a little resistant to try it on when she got to her room, she placed it in her bag and decided to sleep. The Den of Woe took precedence over everything else, so she drank some calming tea they sold down at gift shop and tried to sleep. It would be the most sleep she would have for a while.


	16. Don't Turn Back

_Don't Turn Back_

"You've been avoiding me," Yuna said. Her cold glare was hazy, but still pointedly indignant through the comm. sphere's screen. Baralai's face intuitively respond with an apologetic smile.

"I apologize, Lady Yuna," Baralai said, and Yuna's thin eyes softened as her expression morphed into concern.

"Is she at the Den of Woe already then?" Yuna asked. Baralai felt like the harbinger of bad news that he hadn't been informed on himself. As if his words were simply a premonition: an oracle's prophecy. Instead, he focused on what he had done.

"I'm afraid so. I'm the one that gave her the spheres."

"Yeah, I supposed from your call." Yuna glimpse to the side as if conjuring up some thought. "Why did you call?" She regarded him with a cool seriousness.

"Don't you mean to ask, why did I give her the spheres?" He added, not coyly, but resignedly. He called Yuna because he felt he had to explain himself to someone, so he could let it go. He had to convince himself that Rikku wasn't his responsibility, nor Gippal's, but then she had to be under somebody's watch. It was that reckless youth still lingering in her that made him feel like he ought to tell a parent of the impending doom of their teenager. It also made him feel terribly old.

"No, I don't think so." She pressed her lips to a smile. "Rikku can charm almost anyone into anything." That was the wrong response. It took Baralai out of his comfort zone with a huge whack to his pride.

"Pardon me, Lady Yuna, but she was very honest with me. Well, as far as she thought it necessary. She made no devious acquisitions," Baralai said in his calm political tone. He was plain insulted when it came to the notion of someone trying to trick him into something. He always felt he wasn't the type to be easily swayed, no matter who it was.

"I see. Well then, there's still the question of why call me?" She was the legendary High Summoner. He couldn't have expected to just get the assurance he wanted from her without some suspicion from her part. He hoped he would have been subtle enough to ask for a tiny bit of information from her, but that wouldn't do. So the pride he had just exerted had to be swallowed back.

"Will Rikku be all right? You know her best, and I--," he wished to continue but found himself pausing and failing to mask his eagerness to find out more about the girl. He was worried and he felt guilty, horribly and dauntingly guilty.

"Once Rikku sets her mind to something, she accomplishes it. If anyone would ever go back to that cave and make it through, it would be her." He could tell that Yuna had perceived his guilt and wanted to ease it a bit. With her smile, she told him she didn't find him at all responsible. "I'm sure she appreciates that you helped her. No one else was really listening. It'll be fine, Baralai."

After that, she quickly changed the subject and tempo of the conversation, which brought Baralai out of that awkward mode they had both unwillingly noticed. She wanted to know what was new with Bevelle and Spira's government. She was inquisitive about everything that she had been indifferent to only a few years ago, but she was pleased now with the peaceful and rebuilding mood of the time. He would tell her of the improvements and the increasing stability of the new government, and she would eagerly add "that's so good" every once in a while. After the conversation was done, they both promised to let each other know if either one heard of Rikku first.

It was always a pleasure to speak with Yuna. She had this irrepressibly contagious energy and her optimism was undaunted by any bad news of Spira. She had become especially bright since her engagement to Sir Tidus, and most Spira speculated and rejoiced about their private romance. In a year, neither had left Besaid, and Baralai figured it was probably to retain a small haven for themselves.

What was that like? What was it like to have that extra attachment to the world around you? It wasn't like just a lover. Baralai had a history of a few of those, when he'd had the time. They tended to be quick—if you could call them—relationships, and then fade. He lacked to the attention span, but it couldn't him from wondering it was like to work or play (as Tidus had joined the Blitzball league recently) knowing that there was something outside of it. That the world didn't revolve around career advancements and responsibilities. He had never thought of it. His life had been overcome with politics and Spira. He was married to Spira. He would have to tend to her and help her grow. Well, then that made Spira more of a child. He found that as he set his work aside and let himself plunge into his own personal thoughts, that there was something empty and robotic about his life.

He laughed at his own thoughts. Rikku was the most excitement he'd had since Vegnagun. She was something outside of this city and outside of this plane of work and politics and weary reconstruction. She was youth incarnate, and she reminded him that he wasn't as old as he sometimes thought he was. Perhaps, he thought, that was where his sudden interest in her had risen. After all, he didn't quite know her. The first time he saw her when Yuna came to Bevelle, he had focused mainly on trying to appease her and explaining the terribly embarrassing circumstances regarding the chairman and his son. He had smiled at Rikku absentmindedly, still focusing on Yuna, while she stepped away from view. He caught a glance of the blonde Al Bhed again, after he bowed and he caught her short head nod toward him. They locked eyes only for a second, and he could see the curiosity rising in her eyes. She had all these questions—assumptions—about him, he was sure.

He thought he recognized her as the famed Al Bhed high guardian, but he wasn't sure and quickly dismissed her. The next time he saw them was when he fought them. He tried to prevent them from entering to where Vegnagun was, but the minute he saw how all three were stubbornly decided to enter, he backed down. They gave him quite a beating between the three of them, but now he looked back to it, he deserved it.

"It's not a good sign when you're dazed," Ellil said as he entered the office. "I've been knocking for a little while here."

"Oh, Ellil, I'm sorry." Baralai quickly rearranged the affairs on his desk.

"I've never seen you daze off before," he said curiously, handing him the written minutes of a council meeting.

"Well, I suppose I do so privately."

"Is something the matter Praetor?" Ellil showing a hint of concern of his gray eyebrows.

"No, nothing like that. Just pensive," Baralai lied mostly to himself. Ever since Vegnagun, he had relied on his two old Crimson Squad partners for whenever he needed to talk. Nooj was a better listener than he had thought, and even Paine had become a sort of confidant before she left for her adventure somewhere in Spira. But this time, he couldn't go to anyone. He had tried Yuna, but it was only for information.

This was a sensitive case that he would have to figure out. He laughed in spite of himself.

"Sir?" Ellil still stood there.

"Oh nothing, just a thought that sounded hilarious in my mind." Sensitive case all right. All over a potential crush on girl. Oh yes, definitely made him feel younger and stupider all right.

So that was what he missed out on as teenager. He thanked the Fayth he did, but he felt a little cheated, because perhaps it would have taught him something that he was completely clueless about at this age.

But the problem was that Rikku wasn't just any girl, but someone that had gone through much more than himself and that—perhaps—in a moment of weakness, had come to him with a request that under normal circumstances—as he'd thought them to be—he wouldn't have hesitated to comply—as he didn't. However, Gippal had a point. Baralai asked himself why he hadn't thought it through. It was the Den of Woe, for Yevon's sake. It was the nightmare that had haunted all of them over a year ago.

His mind began to seek the memories of Shuyin, and Baralai stopped. No more wondering for today. No more worrying. He feared the memories much more than he felt guilty for Rikku. He couldn't go back to that. He promised himself he would work to wipe it out from his mind once and for all.


	17. The Hand That Pulls You Back

_The Hand That Pulls You Back_

This is it, she thought as the rocky gray walls closed in, narrowing the path slightly each yard, and the space seemed smaller than the last time she had visited. She focused on the indents on the rock, on the layers of different grays and browns, on the craters and chips created by the weather and by history. The path to the Den of Woe was shorter than she'd remembered. It made carrying the water jug much easier, but it brought her closer to her goal much sooner than she had expected. When she reached the climactic moment—the entrance—it looked just the same. The intricate golden sphere grid outstretched over the stone like a small sun. She noticed something new though. There were some odd handprints against the wall and some half-scribble on it that she couldn't understand. It was as though someone had tried to open it by force.

Rikku ignored the new marks, and set her pack and water jug down. Her heart had been palpitating out of chest as she neared the entrance, but she had rationalized that it was merely the heavy lifting and trekking the rocky path to the cave that had caused the rapid heartbeat. But, as if to rebel, it pounded more forcefully against her chest. She felt like she would heave.

"No Rikku, no turning back now. You're not a big chicken." She took in a deep breath. "You can do this." She crouched and rummaged through her bag for the spheres. She took them in her hand and began placing them each in their slots. After the last one, a light reddish light flashed, and the barrier disappeared. It was a solid wall of dark, which no daylight could penetrate. It was thick and muggy inside, and it smelt of mold and dirt. She saw the small circle on the wall that would release the spheres and seal the Den of Woe again, and her trembling hand reached toward it. Before she could touch it, she stopped herself, gulped the fear that had balled in her throat and turned away from the shutting mechanism. She grabbed her pack and the jug, and with deep breath to absorb the daylight into her, she entered the cave.

A few steps in, she encountered no pyreflies and therefore no source of light. She reached into one of her belt pockets for a glow-light, which she shook to life.

"Okay, all right, no problem," she whispered as she explored the place further. It wasn't until she reached deep into its moist chambers that the pyrefies moved about her in their slow swaying flight. Their hissing disturbed her, and she quickly ran out of the chamber, back into the long path before. She decided to set camp near the door, in case she needed to quickly escape before having a fit or before these things ate her alive.

She would have to get over it eventually and map out the entire cave to strategically determine where to best place the bombs without having the foundation of the mountain collapse around it. The last thing they needed was a landslide into the beach.

She spent the rest of the day pitching her tent and unpacking. She rationed her food, unfolded her tent and pulled out all the blank sheets for mapping and set them neatly into one corner of the tent. Though she busied herself as much as she could, she never forgot where she was and every so often she thought she could hear wailing and the slow hissing of the pyreflies. The Den of Woe was like a big sphere that recorded your feelings, just like the temple in Zanarkand, but with one huge difference. Because of Shuyin's disturbance, these pyreflies acted somewhat like spheres, somewhat like the ones in the Farplane summoning up old memories as palpable as the pyreflies that make up fiends.

Those glowing wisps of energy were unexplainable to her, and like a good old Al Bhed, she hated the unexplainable. If you couldn't ask why, then there was no point. That was their main problem with religion. It tells you not to question, but the more they tell you that, the more you can't help it. Well, for an Al Bhed, she supposed, because for a long time, before Yuna ever came along, nobody questioned a damned thing. It had brought them a thousand years of nonsensical deaths.

Time crawled toward night, and Rikku settled to stay in her tent and zip it closed until sunrise. She could bear it during the day, when she could escape into sunlight if need be, but during the night, to exit darkness only to enter it again would be too much. Little by little she would bring in the tent until she could fully stay at the center of the cave, where so many horrors had happened.

It was at night when the distant voices started and the scattered echoes of shots fired from deep within the cave. It had become active, like an old ghost emerging, and the pyreflies playing on the contents they had recorded three years ago. The low shouts and footfalls of the spectral soldiers kept her awake all night, and at some point, she nearly broke out into a fit of crying. She hated the dead, and she hated the pyreflies for keeping the dead so present in this world.

_Day 2_

An expedition to map the east side of the cave started the minute the sun was out. She hadn't slept, and the disturbing noises of the night had only made her more resolved. She found two crevices in the rock perfect for stuffing enough explosives to blow at least two feet of the stonewall. It would not fill the entire cave, but make it unbearable and unstable enough to traverse through. This task done, she headed toward her tent, which she had brought in about twenty feet and good distance from the entrance. She left the cave to walk to the well near the lift to get some water to bathe. Then she searched for a sphere recording she had brought of Yuna's Thunderplains concert, which distracted her for a small period of time.

She ate her rations for lunch and searched through her bag again for something to do. The mutterings of the soldiers and distant gunshots had started up earlier than yesterday. She didn't dare wander deeper into the cave again for fear she might encounter recordings of Paine, Nooj, Baralai or Gippal. She could do this so long as she didn't see anyone she recognized. Ignoring the voices, she began to sharpen her hand blades and after that, she went through all her garment grids and arranged them by type: magic, physical or other. It was then when she found the old sphere that had washed up ashore and picked up by the creepy woman.

She examined it, noticed that it in fact wasn't playable, and that she had nothing else to do but put it on a garment grid and try it on to see what it was. She decided to equip it under a benign garment grid that merely helped defense and perturbed no other abilities of the sphere. The less intrusive on this unknown thing, the better.

Rikku stood up and activated her garment grid, the sphere shone and a light surrounded her for a moment, but no transformation occurred. Instead she felt two prickles on the back of her neck and a horrible pain down her spine, and then she lost all consciousness.

---

"Rikku," a child's voice whispered hoarsely. "Hey Rikku!" Warm breath on her ear. She tried opening her eyes, but her head hurt too much and they felt too heavy. "Cid's girl, would you wake up already?"

_Gippal_, her mind's voice said, but it couldn't be him. She had distinctly heard a boy's voice. She forced her eyes open, but met only darkness. Her throat was dry, and her chest was heavy. She gasped for breath and then coughed and heaved. Her hands reached for her head as she sat up slowly. Everything was spinning and her sight was blurry but not completely dark. Her left hand crawled around her, searching for a glow-light and finally found one. She shook it, shut her eyes the moment the bright light spread to her surroundings, and took a deep long breath. The moment she opened them again, she met with child's a face. Young Gippal's face.

"Rikku," he said, and she shot backwards, dropping the stick and consequently turning it off. She trembled, afraid to reach for the light again.

"It's not possible. It's all in your head. It's all this cave." She drew her knees to her chest, trying to keep her pounding heart from exploding. Her hand slowly reached again for the glow light. Once she grabbed the tube, she shook it again, slowly fixing her gaze in front of her. The light came and revealed her tent devoid of anything but her own belongings. She stood up slowly, glanced at the deactivated garment grid on her side. The sphere she had tried to use had cracked.

"Faulty shitty sphere," she said grabbing it and throwing it out of the tent.

"Hey! Are you coming out or not?" The voice again. Rikku grabbed her blades, placing the glow tube in her belt.

"Who's there?" she asked as she slowly stepped out of her tent, blades first. Her eyes had instinctively began to water out of fear, simply to let it out somehow, because she knew her hands had to remain steady in case she had to kill any fiend or pyrefly demon in her path.

"Will you hurry up?" The voice insisted. She froze in her steps, but resumed after a long period of silence. She surveyed the tent's surroundings and the few pyreflies lingering around her.

"Go away," she whispered, the knives still steady in her hands.

"Stop being such a chicken," the voice said again. It echoed all around her from no direction in particular.

"What do you want?" It sounded like a plead for her life rather than a question.

"Your mom is looking for you," he said.

"Rikku." She felt two hands on her shoulders and turned around aiming the sharp tip at whoever had got a hold of her. She came face to face with her mother. Her reddish hair glowed with the pyreflies that surrounded. Her eyes were warm and her tight-lipped smile so much more vivid that any memory Rikku had preserved. "I've missed you." She extended her arms out toward her daughter, but Rikku pulled back in tears and shaking her head.

"You're not her," she mouthed, but her mother came closer with her arms outstretched ready to embrace. Rikku held her breath. Her whole body quaked with fear.

"Don't touch her!" hissed little Gippal. "Rikku!" He grabbed her hand. "That's not your mother!" Rikku screamed and shook her head. She pulled the spectral child hand off her and ran in the direction of the entrance.

"No, not that way," Gippal shouted. Rikku felt the small hand around her arm, the little fingers wrapping around it like worms. An inhuman force yanked her from her path, threw her to the ground and forced her back into unconsciousness.


End file.
